The late spring dusk had at length fallen; the horses had been led home from the plough, which remained in characteristic Dorset fashion at the angle of the last furrow, the merciful twilight hiding the rich coating of rust with which a lengthy course of such treatment had endued it; the elder labourers had donned their coats, and lit their pipes, and gone sauntering homewards along the dewy grass border of the lane. Farmer Bellamy had laid aside his pinner—the last cow having long been milked and sent pasturewards in the rear of her fellows—and likewise smoked ruminatively in the chimney corner; his wife faced him, a large basket at her feet containing sundry arrears of mending, a sock upon her outspread left hand, a needle threaded with coarse yarn in the other. It was getting too dark to darn now, and she wondered impatiently why Alice and Lizzie did not come in to light the lamp and do their share of needlework.
But Mrs Bellamy’s daughters formed part of a little group of men and girls who had gathered round the low stone wall at the extremity of the yard; the central point of interest being a certain flat-topped gatepost which marked off the entrance to a disused pig-sty. Lizzie Bellamy was bending over this, her face in close proximity to the paper on which she was writing, her eyes strained in the endeavour to make the most of such light as yet remained. A boy, standing near her, held, at a convenient angle, a penny ink-bottle which he obligingly tilted each time that she required to dip her pen; occasionally in Lizzie’s increasing excitement, the pen missed its mark, whereupon he seized it in his stumpy fingers and guided it to its rightful destination.
Little spasmodic bursts of laughter escaped the writer every now and then, and a kind of smothered chorus of giggles was kept up by the bystanders; while from time to time one of the more adventurous squinted over her shoulder, being admonished in return by a vigorous dig from the girl’s elbow.
At last she threw back her head and dropped her pen with a laughing exclamation—
“I d’ ’low that’ll do.”
“Read it, read it!” cried the others.
“Somebody’ll have to light a match, then,” retorted she.
Jem Frisby produced one, struck it on the wall, and stepped forward.
The light fell on the girl’s face—a good-looking one enough, of the dark-eyed, red-cheeked Dorset type—and illuminated now one, now another, of her companions. All these faces were young, all bore the same expression of expectant, mischievous glee.
“‘My Dear Giles,’” read Lizzie, “‘I take up my pen to write these few lines to let you know a wish what’s long been in my mind—”