She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still
encircling her. Tess's eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.
"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.
"O--I don't know!" she murmured.
As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became
agitated and tried to withdraw.
"Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said he, with a
curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart
had outrun his judgement. "That I--love you dearly and truly I need
not say. But I--it shall go no further now--it distresses you--I am
as surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon
your defencelessness--been too quick and unreflecting, will you?"
"N'--I can't tell."
He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the
milking of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of
the two into one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened
nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that
the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere
acquaintance. Yet in the interval since Crick's last view of them
something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for
their two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the
dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based
upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of
so-called practicalities.
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