Page:Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891 Volume 1).pdf/44

 wooed and won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The struggles and wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an excitement to her no more; and when they became fierce she rebuked them.

She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father’s odd appearance and manner returned upon the girl’s mind to make her anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from the dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at which the parental cottage lay.

While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well—so well. They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of the house, occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous gallopade, the favourite ditty of ‘The Spotted Cow’—

The cradle-rocking and the song would cease