“Molly,” she said, rather languidly, “just run out and get me a bunch of dock-leaves:  the butter’s ready to pack up now.”

“D’ you hear what’s happened, Hetty?” said her aunt.

“No; how should I hear anything?” was the answer, in a pettish tone.

“Not as you’d care much, I daresay, if you did hear; for you’re too feather-headed to mind if everybody was dead, so as you could stay upstairs a-dressing yourself for two hours by the clock.  But anybody besides yourself ’ud mind about such things happening to them as think a deal more of you than you deserve.  But Adam Bede and all his kin might be drownded for what you’d care—­you’d be perking at the glass the next minute.”

“Adam Bede—­drowned?” said Hetty, letting her arms fall and looking rather bewildered, but suspecting that her aunt was as usual exaggerating with a didactic purpose.

“No, my dear, no,” said Dinah kindly, for Mrs. Poyser had passed on to the pantry without deigning more precise information.  “Not Adam.  Adam’s father, the old man, is drowned.  He was drowned last night in the Willow Brook.  Mr. Irwine has just told me about it.”

“Oh, how dreadful!” said Hetty, looking serious, but not deeply affected; and as Molly now entered with the dock-leaves, she took them silently and returned to the dairy without asking further questions.

Chapter IX

Hetty’s World

While she adjusted the broad leaves that set off the pale fragrant butter as the primrose is set off by its nest of green I am afraid Hetty was thinking a great deal more of the looks Captain Donnithorne had cast at her than of Adam and his troubles.  Bright, admiring glances from a handsome young gentleman with white hands, a gold chain, occasional regimentals, and wealth and grandeur immeasurable—­those were the warm rays that set poor Hetty’s heart vibrating and playing its little foolish tunes over and over again.  We do not hear that Memnon’s statue gave forth its melody at all under the rushing of the mightiest wind, or in response to any other influence divine or human than certain short-lived sunbeams of morning; and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

Hetty was quite used to the thought that people liked to look at her.  She was not blind to the fact that young Luke Britton of Broxton came to Hayslope Church on a Sunday afternoon on purpose that he might see her; and that he would have made much more decided advances if her uncle Poyser, thinking but lightly of a young man whose father’s land was so foul as old Luke Britton’s, had not forbidden her aunt to encourage him by any civilities.  She was aware, too, that Mr. Craig, the gardener at the