there was bright sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the
ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch
a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long fingers pointing afar to where
the green alluvial reaches abutted against the sloping sides of the vale.
    Men were at work here and there - for it was the season for »taking up« the
meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the winter irrigation, and
mending their banks where trodden down by the cows. The shovelfuls of loam,
black as jet, brought there by the river when it was as wide as the whole
valley, were an essence of soils, pounded champaigns of the past, steeped,
refined, and subtilized to extraordinary richness, out of which came all the
fertility of the mead, and of the cattle grazing there.
    Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist in sight of these watermen, with
the air of a man who was accustomed to public dalliance, though actually as shy
as she who, with lips parted and eyes askance on the labourers, wore the look of
a wary animal the while.
    »You are not ashamed of owning me as yours before them!« she said gladly.
    »O no!«
    »But if it should reach the ears of your friends at Emminster that you are
walking about like this with me, a milkmaid -«
    »The most bewitching milkmaid ever seen.«
    »They might feel it a hurt to their dignity.«
    »My dear girl - a d'Urberville hurt the dignity of a Clare! It is a grand
card to play - that of your belonging to such a family, and I am reserving it
for a grand effect when we are married, and have the proofs of your descent from
Parson Tringham. Apart from that, my future is to be totally foreign to my
family - it will not affect even the surface of their lives. We shall leave this
part of England - perhaps England itself - and what does it matter how people
regard us here? You will like going, will you not?«
    She could answer no more than a bare affirmative, so great was the emotion
aroused in her at the thought of going through the world with him as his own
familiar friend. Her feelings almost filled her ears like a babble of waves, and
surged up to her eyes. She put her hand in his, and thus they went on, to a
place where the reflected sun glared up from the river, under a bridge, with a
molten-metallic glow that dazzled