It was a pretty scene outside the house:  the farmers and their families were moving about the lawn, among the flowers and shrubs, or along the broad straight road leading from the east front, where a carpet of mossy grass spread on each side, studded here and there with a dark flat-boughed cedar, or a grand pyramidal fir sweeping the ground with its branches, all tipped with a fringe of paler green.  The groups of cottagers in the park were gradually diminishing, the young ones being attracted towards the lights that were beginning to gleam from the windows of the gallery in the abbey, which was to be their dancing-room, and some of the sober elder ones thinking it time to go home quietly.  One of these was Lisbeth Bede, and Seth went with her—­not from filial attention only, for his conscience would not let him join in dancing.  It had been rather a melancholy day to Seth:  Dinah had never been more constantly present with him than in this scene, where everything was so unlike her.  He saw her all the more vividly after looking at the thoughtless faces and gay-coloured dresses of the young women—­just as one feels the beauty and the greatness of a pictured Madonna the more when it has been for a moment screened from us by a vulgar head in a bonnet.  But this presence of Dinah in his mind only helped him to bear the better with his mother’s mood, which had been becoming more and more querulous for the last hour.  Poor Lisbeth was suffering from a strange conflict of feelings.  Her joy and pride in the honour paid to her darling son Adam was beginning to be worsted in the conflict with the jealousy and fretfulness which had revived when Adam came to tell her that Captain Donnithorne desired him to join the dancers in the hall.  Adam was getting more and more out of her reach; she wished all the old troubles back again, for then it mattered more to Adam what his mother said and did.

“Eh, it’s fine talkin’ o’ dancin’,” she said, “an’ thy father not a five week in’s grave.  An’ I wish I war there too, i’stid o’ bein’ left to take up merrier folks’s room above ground.”

“Nay, don’t look at it i’ that way, Mother,” said Adam, who was determined to be gentle to her to-day.  “I don’t mean to dance—­I shall only look on.  And since the captain wishes me to be there, it ’ud look as if I thought I knew better than him to say as I’d rather not stay.  And thee know’st how he’s behaved to me to-day.”

“Eh, thee’t do as thee lik’st, for thy old mother’s got no right t’ hinder thee.  She’s nought but th’ old husk, and thee’st slipped away from her, like the ripe nut.”

“Well, Mother,” said Adam, “I’ll go and tell the captain as it hurts thy feelings for me to stay, and I’d rather go home upo’ that account:  he won’t take it ill then, I daresay, and I’m willing.”  He said this with some effort, for he really longed to be near Hetty this evening.

“Nay, nay, I wonna ha’ thee do that—­the young squire ’ull be angered.  Go an’ do what thee’t ordered to do, an’ me and Seth ’ull go whome.  I know it’s a grit honour for thee to be so looked on—­an’ who’s to be prouder on it nor thy mother?  Hadna she the cumber o’ rearin’ thee an’ doin’ for thee all these ’ears?”