"No, it is not," said Jane primly, "but it's very much to the point."
"Oh, you wise woman!" whispered Martin (and Jane colored with satisfaction, because she was turned seventeen). "What would poor men do without your help?"
Then he kissed very respectfully the hand that had pricked him: on the back and on the palm and on the four fingers and thumb and on the wrist. And then he began looking for a new place, but before he could make up his mind Jane had taken her hand and herself away, saying "Good night" very politely as she went. So he lay down to dream that for the first time in his life he had made up his mind. But Jane, whose mind was always made up, for the first time in her life dreamed otherwise.
It happened that by some imprudence Martin had laid himself down exactly under the gap in the hedge, and when Old Gillman came along the other side crying "Maids!" in the morning, the careless fellow had no time to retreat across the open to safe cover; so there was nothing for it but to conceal himself under the very nose of danger and roll into the ditch. Which he hurriedly did, while the milkmaids ran here and there like yellow chickens frightened by a hawk. Not knowing what else to do, they at last clustered above him about the gap, filling it so with their pretty faces that the farmer found room for not so much as an eyelash when he arrived with his bread. And it was for all the world as though the hedge, forgetting it was autumn, had broken out at that particular spot into pink-and-white may. So that even Old Gillman had no fault to find with the arrangement.
"All astir, my maids?" said he.
"Yes, master, yes!" they answered breathlessly; all but Joscelyn, who cried, "Oh! oh! oh!" and bit her lip hard, and stood suddenly on one foot.
"What's amiss with ye?" asked Gillman.
"Nothing, master," said she, very red in the face. "A nettle stung my ankle."
"Well, I'd not weep for t," said Gillman.
"Indeed I'm not weeping!" cried Joscelyn loudly.