the evening breeze.  Foolish thoughts!  But all this happened, you must remember, nearly sixty years ago, and Hetty was quite uneducated—­a simple farmer’s girl, to whom a gentleman with a white hand was dazzling as an Olympian god.  Until to-day, she had never looked farther into the future than to the next time Captain Donnithorne would come to the Farm, or the next Sunday when she should see him at church; but now she thought, perhaps he would try to meet her when she went to the Chase to-morrow—­and if he should speak to her, and walk a little way, when nobody was by!  That had never happened yet; and now her imagination, instead of retracing the past, was busy fashioning what would happen to-morrow—­whereabout in the Chase she should see him coming towards her, how she should put her new rose-coloured ribbon on, which he had never seen, and what he would say to her to make her return his glance—­a glance which she would be living through in her memory, over and over again, all the rest of the day.

In this state of mind, how could Hetty give any feeling to Adam’s troubles, or think much about poor old Thias being drowned?  Young souls, in such pleasant delirium as hers are as unsympathetic as butterflies sipping nectar; they are isolated from all appeals by a barrier of dreams—­by invisible looks and impalpable arms.

While Hetty’s hands were busy packing up the butter, and her head filled with these pictures of the morrow, Arthur Donnithorne, riding by Mr. Irwine’s side towards the valley of the Willow Brook, had also certain indistinct anticipations, running as an undercurrent in his mind while he was listening to Mr. Irwine’s account of Dinah—­indistinct, yet strong enough to make him feel rather conscious when Mr. Irwine suddenly said, “What fascinated you so in Mrs. Poyser’s dairy, Arthur?  Have you become an amateur of damp quarries and skimming dishes?”

Arthur knew the rector too well to suppose that a clever invention would be of any use, so he said, with his accustomed frankness, “No, I went to look at the pretty butter-maker Hetty Sorrel.  She’s a perfect Hebe; and if I were an artist, I would paint her.  It’s amazing what pretty girls one sees among the farmers’ daughters, when the men are such clowns.  That common, round, red face one sees sometimes in the men—­all cheek and no features, like Martin Poyser’s—­comes out in the women of the famuly as the most charming phiz imaginable.”

“Well, I have no objection to your contemplating Hetty in an artistic light, but I must not have you feeding her vanity and filling her little noddle with the notion that she’s a great beauty, attractive to fine gentlemen, or you will spoil her for a poor man’s wife—­honest Craig’s, for example, whom I have seen bestowing soft glances on her.  The little puss seems already to have airs enough to make a husband as miserable as it’s a law of nature for a quiet man to be when he marries a beauty.  Apropos of marrying, I hope our friend