"I'll bring it to you here in the passage," she said. "There's nobody but me about the house to-day."
She brought him a bottle and a glass, and he drank.
Arabella began shaking with suppressed laughter. "What is this, my dear?" he asked, smacking his lips.
"Oh—a drop of wine—and something in it." Laughing again she said: "I poured your own love-philtre into it, that you sold me at the agricultural show, don't you re-member?"
"I do, I do! Clever woman! But you must be prepared for the consequences." Putting his arm round her shoulders he kissed her there and then.
"Don't don't," she whispered, laughing good-humouredly. "My man will hear."
She let him out of the house, and as she went back she said to herself: "Well! Weak women must provide for a rainy day. And if my poor fellow upstairs do go off—as I suppose he will soon—it's well to keep chances open. And I can't pick and choose now as I could when I was younger. And one must take the old if one can't get the young."
XI
The last pages to which the chronicler of these lives would ask the reader's attention are concerned with the scene in and out of Jude's bedroom when leafy summer came round again.
His face was now so thin that his old friends would hardly have known him. It was afternoon, and Arabella was at the looking-glass curling her hair, which operation she performed by heating an umbrella-stay in the flame of a candle she had lighted, and using it upon the flowing lock. When she had finished this, practised a dimple, and put on her things, she cast her eyes round upon Jude. He seemed to be sleeping, though his position was an elevated one, his malady preventing him lying down.