on Hetty besides
that of disappointing her and making her cry. She knew quite well whom
he had in his mind in his allusions to marriage, and to a sober, solid
husband; and when she was in her bedroom again, the possibility of her
marrying Adam presented itself to her in a new light. In a mind where no
strong sympathies are at work, where there is no supreme sense of
right to which the agitated nature can cling and steady itself to quiet
endurance, one of the first results of sorrow is a desperate vague
clutching after any deed that will change the actual condition. Poor
Hetty's vision of consequences, at no time more than a narrow fantastic
calculation of her own probable pleasures and pains, was now quite shut
out by reckless irritation under present suffering, and she was ready
for one of those convulsive, motiveless actions by which wretched men
and women leap from a temporary sorrow into a lifelong misery.

Why should she not marry Adam? She did not care what she did, so that
it made some change in her life. She felt confident that he would still
want to marry her, and any further thought about Adam's happiness in the
matter had never yet visited her.

"Strange!" perhaps you will say, "this rush of impulse to-wards a course
that might have seemed the most repugnant to her present state of mind,
and in only the second night of her sadness!"

Yes, the actions of a little trivial soul like Hetty's, struggling
amidst the serious sad destinies of a human being, are strange. So are
the motions of a little vessel without ballast tossed about on a stormy
sea. How pretty it looked with its parti-coloured sail in the sunlight,
moored in the quiet bay!

"Let that man bear the loss who loosed it from its moorings."

But that will not save the vessel--the pretty thing that might have been
a lasting joy.

Chapter XXXII

Mrs. Poyser "Has Her Say Out"

THE next Saturday evening there was much excited discussion at the
Donnithorne Arms concerning an incident which had occurred that very
day--no less than a second appearance of the smart man in top-boots said
by some to be a mere farmer in treaty for the Chase Farm, by others to
be the future steward, but by Mr. Casson himself, the personal witness
to the stranger's visit, pronounced contemptuously to be nothing better
than a bailiff, such as Satchell had been before him. No one had thought
of denying Mr. Casson's testimony to the fact that he had seen
the stranger;