Moreover, had he looked at those letters of hers with any but a lover's eyes, he could not help thinking that he should have found very little in them; at any rate, they were not half so long as his to her had been, and this was clearly reversing the order of nature. At the same time, little as they contained, they—one or two later ones, at least—had in them some things not altogether agreeable. He did not half like Sarah's way of mentioning the young Oxford student. Oxford student, indeed! What did an Oxford student mean by those constant visits to High Beech Farm? It was not to see his uncle Mark, Walter gravely opined; nor his aunt, Mrs. Mark, either. He wisely, or unwisely, concluded, therefore, that Sarah must be the attraction. And he had heard enough of Oxford students, from his old friend Mr. Rubric, to think that they were not to be trusted out of sight.
It was all very well, he argued, for Sarah to write about him as she had done in that last letter of hers, as though she were annoyed with his pertinacity, and played practical jokes upon him, by seating him upon the hardest, knobbiest parlour chair, to get rid of him the sooner. But Walter knew where such jokes lead to sometimes; and, at any rate, he himself had, in his earlier days of courtship, had experience of that same hard and knobby chair without any acceleration of locomotion on his part; and so it might be on the part of the Oxford student. Many aches and bruises inflicted by knobby chairs had not destroyed his love; and if the Oxford student had dared to lift his eyes to Sarah's charms in the way of admiration, a few knobs on the hard-bottomed chair would make no difference to that admiration, Master Walter guessed.
And had not he had hints of what had lately been going on at High Beech from his sister Elizabeth, who, being the principal scribe, apart from himself, in the family, took care that he should be pretty well posted up in all matters calculated to keep warm his not unreasonable disapproval of his uncle Mark's conduct, and to kindle a lover's jealousy of his betrothed?
We know that she once said, "Walter shan't marry Sarah, if we can help it, right or wrong," and she meant what she said. And that she had the exquisite feminine art of setting about the carrying out of her determination in the cleverest possible manner, was proved by the effect her innuendoes had already produced.
All these matters Walter had been turning over in his mind as he plodded homeward with his friend Ralph, and, combined with bodily fatigue, they had their natural effect in mental irritation, not at first perceived, however, by his companion.
"That was a queer start we had with the big farmer at Bingle-bottom," said Ralph, laughing.
"Was it?" said Walter, curtly.
"Wasn't it? Threatening to set his bull-dog at us if we didn't move off his forty-acre field in less than no time."
"And would have served us right too," growled the assistant surveyor.
"Ullo!"