She didn’t notice particular!  Now, I put it to you, Was that the sort of girl to be the wife of a man who had got on like Jack had?  I for one didn’t think so.  If she didn’t care for money why should she have it, when there was plenty that did?  And if love in a cottage was what she wanted, and kisses and foolishness out of poetry-books, I suppose one man’s pretty much as good as another for that sort of thing.

So I said, ’Come along in, dear, and we will get along with the jam-making, and talk it all over nicely.  I’m so glad he’s come back.  I always say he would, if you remember.’

Not that I ever had, but she didn’t seem to know any different, anyhow.

The next few days Mattie was like a different girl.  I will say for her that she always did her fair share of the work, but she did it with a face as long as a fiddle.  Only now her face was all round and dimply, and like a child’s that has got a prize at school.

On Wednesday afternoon she said to me, ’I’m going to meet Jack, and don’t you say a word to the others about it, Jane.  I’ll tell father myself when I come back, if you’ll get the tea like a good girl, and just tell them I’ve gone up to the village.’

‘I don’t tell lies as a rule, especially for other people,’ I says; ‘but I don’t mind doing it for you this once.’

And she kissed me (she had got mighty fond of kissing these last few days), and ran upstairs to get ready.  When she come down, if you’ll believe me, she wasn’t in her best dress as any other girl would have been, but she had gone and put on a dowdy old green and white delaine that had been her Sunday dress, trimmed with green satin piping, three years before, and the old hat she had with all the flowers faded and the ribbons crumpled up, that was three year old too, and the very one she used to walk home from church with him on Sundays in.  And her with a really good blue poplin laid by and a new bonnet with red roses in it, only come home the week before from Maidstone.

She come through the kitchen where I was setting the tea, and she took the key of the church off the nail in the wall.  Our farm was full a mile from the village, and half way between it and the church.  So we kept one key, and Jack’s uncle, who was the sexton, he had the other.

‘What time was you to meet Jack?’ I says.

‘He didn’t say,’ said she; ‘but it used to be half-past six.’

‘You’re full early,’ says I.

‘Yes,’ she says, ’but I’ve got to take the butter down to Weller’s, and to call in for something first.’

And, of course, I knew that she meant that she had to call in for that note at the church.

Minute she was out of the way, I runs into the kitchen, and says to our maid—­

’Poor Mrs. Tibson’s not so well, Polly.  I’m going over to see her.  Give the men their tea, will you? there’s a good girl.’

And she said she would.  And in ten minutes I was dressed, and nicely dressed too, for I had on my white frock and the things I had had at a girl’s wedding the summer before, and a pair of new gloves I had got out of my butter-money.