“I may as well say it now as later, dearest,” he resumed gently.  “I wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have been thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads.  I shall soon want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for my wife a woman who knows all about the management of farms.  Will you be that woman, Tessy?”

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn.  She had bowed to the inevitable result of proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated upon this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her without quite meaning himself to do it so soon.  With pain that was like the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

“O Mr Clare—­I cannot be your wife—­I cannot be!”

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess’s very heart, and she bowed her face in her grief.

“But, Tess!” he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more greedily close.  “Do you say no?  Surely you love me?”

“O yes, yes!  And I would rather be yours than anybody’s in the world,” returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl.  “But I CANNOT marry you!”

“Tess,” he said, holding her at arm’s length, “you are engaged to marry some one else!”

“No, no!”

“Then why do you refuse me?”

“I don’t want to marry!  I have not thought of doing it.  I cannot!  I only want to love you.”

“But why?”

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered—­

“Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn’ like you to marry such as me.  She will want you to marry a lady.”

“Nonsense—­I have spoken to them both.  That was partly why I went home.”

“I feel I cannot—­never, never!” she echoed.

“Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?”

“Yes—­I did not expect it.”

“If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time,” he said.  “It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.  I’ll not allude to it again for a while.”

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and began anew.  But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes in the air.  She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend and dear advocate, she could never explain.

“I can’t skim—­I can’t!” she said, turning away from him.

Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began talking in a more general way: 

You quite misapprehend my parents.  They are the most simple-mannered people alive, and quite unambitious.  They are two of the few remaining Evangelical school.  Tessy, are you an Evangelical?”