Page:Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891 Volume 2).pdf/151

 ‘I should have had three years more of your heart than I can ever have now. Then I should not have wasted my time as I have done—I should have had so much longer happiness!’

It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her who was tormented thus; but a girl of simple life, not yet one-and-twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe. To calm herself the more completely she rose from her little stool and left the room, overturning the stool with her skirts as she went.

He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle of green ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped pleasantly, and hissed out bubbles of sap from their ends. When she came back she was herself again.

‘Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious, fitful, Tess?’ he said, good humouredly, as he spread a cushion for her on the stool, and seated himself in the settle beside her, ‘I wanted to ask you something, and just then you ran away.’

‘Yes, perhaps I am capricious,’ she murmured. She suddenly approached him, and put a hand