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 colour, unfastened her frock and began suckling the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill the young mother sat it upright in her lap, and looking into the far distance dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely combined passionateness with contempt.

‘She’s fond of that there child, though she mid pretend not to be, and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,’ observed the woman in the red petticoat.

‘She’ll soon leave off saying that’, replied the one in buff. ‘Lord, ’tis wonderful what a body can get used to in time!’