r a minute or two. Bessie sat with her hands on her
lap and her face turned towards the open door. Beyond the cherry-red
phloxes outside it, the ground fell rapidly to the village, rising again
beyond the houses to a great stubble field, newly shorn. Gleaners were
already in the field, their bent figures casting sharp shadows on the
golden upland, and the field itself stretched upwards to a great wood
that lay folded round the top of a spreading hill. To the left, beyond
the hill, a wide plain travelled into the sunset, its level spaces cut
by the scrawled elms and hedgerows of the nearer landscape. The beauty
of it all--the beauty of an English Midland--was of a modest and
measured sort, depending chiefly on bounties of sun and air, on the
delicacies of gentle curves and the pleasant intermingling of wood and
cornfield, of light spaces with dark, of solid earth with luminous sky.

Such as it was, however, neither Bessie nor John spared it a moment's
attention. Bessie was thinking a hundred busy thoughts. John, on the
other hand, had begun to consider her with an excited scrutiny. She was
a handsome woman, as she sat in the doorway with her fine brown head
turned to the light. But John naturally was not thinking of that. He was
in the throes of decision.

'Look 'ere, Bessie,' he said suddenly; 'what 'ud you say if I wor to ask
Isaac an you to take care on it?'

Bessie started slightly. Then she looked frankly round at him. She had
very keen, lively eyes, and a bright red-brown colour on thin cheeks.
The village applied to her the epithet which John's thoughts had applied
to Muster Hill's widow. They said she was 'caselty,' which means
flighty, haphazard, excitable; but she was popular, nevertheless, and
had many friends.

It was, of course, her own settled opinion that her uncle ought to leave
that box with her and Isaac; and it had wounded her vanity, and her
affection besides, that John had never yet made any such proposal,
though she knew--as, indeed, the village knew--that he was perplexed as
to what to do with his hoard. But she had never dared to suggest that he
should leave it with her, out of fear of Eliza Bolderfield. Bessie was
well aware that Eliza thought ill of her and would dissuade John from
any such arrangement if she could. And so formidable was Eliza--a woman
of the hardest and sourest virtue--when she chose, that Bessie was
afraid of her, even on her death-bed, though generally ready enough to
qua