well-informed and versatile - which was certainly true, her
natural quickness, and her admiration for him, having led her to pick up his
vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his knowledge, to a surprising extent.
After these tender contests and her victory she would go away by herself under
the remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge, or into her room, if at
a leisure interval, and mourn silently, not a minute after an apparently
phlegmatic negative.
    The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the side of
his - two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience - that she tried to
fortify her resolution by every means in her power. She had come to Talbothays
with a made-up mind. On no account could she agree to a step which might
afterwards cause bitter rueing to her husband for his blindness in wedding her.
And she held that what her conscience had decided for her when her mind was
unbiassed ought not to be overruled now.
    »Why don't somebody tell him all about me?« she said. »It was only forty
miles off - why hasn't it reached here? Somebody must know!«
    Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.
    For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from the sad
countenances of her chamber companions that they regarded her not only as the
favourite, but as the chosen; but they could see for themselves that she did not
put herself in his way.
    Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life was so
distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and positive pain. At the
next cheese-making the pair were again left alone together. The dairyman himself
had been lending a hand; but Mr. Crick, as well as his wife, seemed latterly to
have acquired a suspicion of mutual interest between these two; though they
walked so circumspectly that suspicion was but of the faintest. Anyhow, the
dairyman left them to themselves.
    They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting them into the vats.
The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a large scale; and amid
the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess Durbey-field's hands showed
themselves of the pinkness of the rose. Angel, who was filling the vats with his
hand-fuls, suddenly ceased, and laid his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were
rolled far above the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her
soft arm.
    Although the early September weather was sultry,