ghtful opportunity for a _tete-a-tete_, nobody else being in the
room, and they talked freely.

She told him about the school as it was at that date, and the rough
living, and the mixed character of her fellow-students, gathered
together from all parts of the diocese, and how she had to get up and
work by gas-light in the early morning, with all the bitterness of
a young person to whom restraint was new. To all this he listened;
but it was not what he wanted especially to know--her relations with
Phillotson. That was what she did not tell. When they had sat and
eaten, Jude impulsively placed his hand upon hers; she looked up
and smiled, and took his quite freely into her own little soft one,
dividing his fingers and coolly examining them, as if they were the
fingers of a glove she was purchasing.

"Your hands are rather rough, Jude, aren't they?" she said.

"Yes. So would yours be if they held a mallet and chisel all day."

"I don't dislike it, you know. I think it is noble to see a man's
hands subdued to what he works in... Well, I'm rather glad I came
to this training-school, after all. See how independent I shall be
after the two years' training! I shall pass pretty high, I expect,
and Mr. Phillotson will use his influence to get me a big school."

She had touched the subject at last. "I had a suspicion, a fear,"
said Jude, "that he--cared about you rather warmly, and perhaps
wanted to marry you."

"Now don't be such a silly boy!"

"He has said something about it, I expect."

"If he had, what would it matter? An old man like him!"

"Oh, come, Sue; he's not so very old. And I know what I saw him
doing--"

"Not kissing me--that I'm certain!"

"No. But putting his arm round your waist."

"Ah--I remember. But I didn't know he was going to."

"You are wriggling out if it, Sue, and it isn't quite kind!"

Her ever-sensitive lip began to quiver, and her eye to blink, at
something this reproof was deciding her to say.

"I know you'll be angry if I tell you everything, and that's why I
don't want to!"

"Very well, then, dear," he said soothingly. "I have no real right
to ask you, and I don't wish to know."

"I shall tell you!" said she, with the perverseness that was
part of her. "This is what I have done: I have promised--I
have promised--that I will marry him when I come out of the
training-school two years hence, and have got my certificate; his
plan being that we shall then take a large