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 all in bed, and two o’clock next morning was the latest hour for starting with the beehives if they were to be delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before the Saturday market began, the way thither lying by bad roads over a distance of between twenty and thirty miles, and the horse and waggon being of the slowest. At half-past one Mrs. Durbeyfield came into the large bedroom where Tess and all her little brothers and sisters slept.

‘The poor man can’t go,’ she said to her eldest daughter, whose great eyes had opened the moment her mother’s hand touched the door.

Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a dream and this information.

‘But somebody must go,’ she replied. ‘It is late for the hives already. Swarming will soon be over for the year; and if we put off taking ’em till next week’s market the call for ’em will be past, and they’ll be thrown on our hands.’

Mrs. Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. ‘Some young feller, perhaps, would go? One of them who were so much after dancing with ’ee yesterday,’ she presently suggested.

‘Oh no—I wouldn’t have it for the world!’ declared Tess proudly. ‘And letting everybody