"True, true," said Melbury; "and I hope it will be for the best. Yes,
let me get 'em married up as soon as I can, so as to have it over and
done with." He continued looking at the imprint, while he added,
"Suppose she should be dying, and never make a track on this path any
more?"

"She'll write soon, depend upon't. Come, 'tis wrong to stay here and
brood so."

He admitted it, but said he could not help it. "Whether she write or
no, I shall fetch her in a few days." And thus speaking, he covered the
track, and preceded his wife indoors.

Melbury, perhaps, was an unlucky man in having within him the sentiment
which could indulge in this foolish fondness about the imprint of a
daughter's footstep. Nature does not carry on her government with a
view to such feelings, and when advancing years render the open hearts
of those who possess them less dexterous than formerly in shutting
against the blast, they must suffer "buffeting at will by rain and
storm" no less than Little Celandines.

But her own existence, and not Mr. Melbury's, was the centre of Marty's
consciousness, and it was in relation to this that the matter struck
her as she slowly withdrew.

"That, then, is the secret of it all," she said. "And Giles
Winterborne is not for me, and the less I think of him the better."

She returned to her cottage. The sovereigns were staring at her from
the looking-glass as she had left them. With a preoccupied
countenance, and with tears in her eyes, she got a pair of scissors,
and began mercilessly cutting off the long locks of her hair, arranging
and tying them with their points all one way, as the barber had
directed. Upon the pale scrubbed deal of the coffin-stool table they
stretched like waving and ropy weeds over the washed gravel-bed of a
clear stream.

She would not turn again to the little looking-glass, out of humanity
to herself, knowing what a deflowered visage would look back at her,
and almost break her heart; she dreaded it as much as did her own
ancestral goddess Sif the reflection in the pool after the rape of her
locks by Loke the malicious. She steadily stuck to business, wrapped
the hair in a parcel, and sealed it up, after which she raked out the
fire and went to bed, having first set up an alarum made of a candle
and piece of thread, with a stone attached.

But such a reminder was unnecessary to-night. Having tossed till about
five o'clock, Marty heard the sparrows walking down their lo