To-morrow was the day.
"I shall give way--I shall say yes--I shall let myself marry
him--I cannot help it!" she jealously panted, with her hot face to
the pillow that night, on hearing one of the other girls sigh his
name in her sleep. "I can't bear to let anybody have him but me!
Yet it is a wrong to him, and may kill him when he knows! O my
heart--O--O--O!"
XXIX
"Now, who mid ye think I've heard news o' this morning?" said
Dairyman Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day, with a riddling
gaze round upon the munching men and maids. "Now, just who mid ye
think?"
One guessed, and another guessed. Mrs Crick did not guess, because
she knew already.
"Well," said the dairyman, "'tis that slack-twisted 'hore's-bird of a
feller, Jack Dollop. He's lately got married to a widow-woman."
"Not Jack Dollop? A villain--to think o' that!" said a milker.
The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield's consciousness, for
it was the name of the lover who had wronged his sweetheart, and had
afterwards been so roughly used by the young woman's mother in the
butter-churn.
"And had he married the valiant matron's daughter, as he promised?"
asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was
reading at the little table to which he was always banished by Mrs
Crick, in her sense of his gentility.
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