e; walking about, and making impossible
suggestions in quaint academic phrases till your flesh creeps and you
wish them dead. Do you take sugar?"

Mr. Maybold was at this instant seen coming up the path.

"There! That's he coming! How I wish you were not here!--that is, how
awkward--dear, dear!" she exclaimed, with a quick ascent of blood to her
face, and irritated with Dick rather than the vicar, as it seemed.

"Pray don't be alarmed on my account, Miss Day--good-afternoon!" said
Dick in a huff, putting on his hat, and leaving the room hastily by the
back-door.

The horse was caught and put in, and on mounting the shafts to start he
saw through the window the vicar, standing upon some books piled in a
chair, and driving a nail into the wall; Fancy, with a demure glance,
holding the canary-cage up to him, as if she had never in her life
thought of anything but vicars and canaries.

CHAPTER VIII: DICK MEETS HIS FATHER

For several minutes Dick drove along homeward, with the inner eye of
reflection so anxiously set on his passages at arms with Fancy, that the
road and scenery were as a thin mist over the real pictures of his mind.
Was she a coquette? The balance between the evidence that she did love
him and that she did not was so nicely struck, that his opinion had no
stability. She had let him put his hand upon hers; she had allowed her
gaze to drop plumb into the depths of his--his into hers--three or four
times; her manner had been very free with regard to the basin and towel;
she had appeared vexed at the mention of Shiner. On the other hand, she
had driven him about the house like a quiet dog or cat, said Shiner cared
for her, and seemed anxious that Mr. Maybold should do the same.

Thinking thus as he neared the handpost at Mellstock Cross, sitting on
the front board of the spring cart--his legs on the outside, and his
whole frame jigging up and down like a candle-flame to the time of
Smart's trotting--who should he see coming down the hill but his father
in the light wagon, quivering up and down on a smaller scale of shakes,
those merely caused by the stones in the road. They were soon crossing
each other's front.

"Weh-hey!" said the tranter to Smiler.

"Weh-hey!" said Dick to Smart, in an echo of the same voice.

"Th'st hauled her back, I suppose?" Reuben inquired peaceably.

"Yes," said Dick, with such a clinching period at the end that it seemed
he was never going to add another word.