In the distance a dog barked, and wheels
occasionally rattled along the dry road.
Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;
and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring
in it that cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the
hours, the crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and
shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall,
which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of
summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.
Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the
soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess
stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce
now a hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long
time notice the person who worked nearest to her--a man in a long
smockfrock who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and
whom she supposed her father had sent there to advance the work.
She became more conscious of him when the direction of his digging
brought him closer. Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it
swerved, and the two were visible to each other but divided from all
the rest.
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