They were walking through the orchard behind her home, along a path that led to the shore. She stopped and plucked some wild flowers from the hedge, perhaps to hide a blush.
"I have a favour to ask you," she said, in a low voice, and stooping her head over the posy. "Do not say Mistress Carew—I don't like it. I had rather you would call me Nelly."
There was the least possible inflection of voice on the pronoun, just enough to make John Garnet's heart beat as it had never beat before.
"Nelly," he repeated, "will you give me one of those flowers?"
"You may take the whole bunch," she answered, "I only gathered them for you." But she walked on so fast after this gratifying avowal, that it was impossible to tell her one word of the old tale that was rising to his lips.
All that day she took care not to be alone with him another minute. From the orchard she took him to the beach, where the villagers were collecting sea-weed; thence to a field where harvest was already nearly done; home by the cow-house, with its attendant milkmaid; and so back to grandfather's parlour, where she poured out his evening draught of cider with her own hands.
Why Nelly should have cried like a naughty child when she laid her head on the pillow; why she should have woke before daybreak, and risen at sunrise to put new ribbons in her dress of a colour she had lately heard somebody say he liked, is more than I can take upon me to explain. I can understand, however, why John Garnet lay a-bed longer than usual that same morning, and turned on the other side, hoping to go to sleep again, that he might dream another dream like the last about Nelly Carew.
Abner Gale's dreams, if he had any, would seem to have been of no such pleasant nature, for he was stirring with the dawn, breakfasting fiercely before sunrise, on Devonshire mutton and strong ale, cursing, notwithstanding his profession, each of his servants in turn for imputed shortcomings, from his cherry-cheeked parlour-maid to the man who fed the pigs. In and out the house, and through the precincts of the farm-yard, or "barton," as he called it, the master's eye was only less dreaded than his tongue, his tongue than his hand. Yet was he well served too, with the scrupulous obedience of fear.
He would fain have mounted his horse and ridden across the moor in the direction of Porlock again to-day, but even Abner Gale was compelled to pay some respect to the decencies of life, and even such a parish as his exacted a few hours' attention after an absence of weeks.
There were conditions to be written out for a wrestling-match between two rival champions; arrangements to be made for supplying the ringers with unlimited cider at their approaching feast; a badger recently drawn to visit; and some terrier-puppies just opening their eyes on this wicked world, to inspect.