“Certainly I did not, I tell you.”
Liddy assumed a smaller physiognomy, and shut her lips decisively.
This move was unexpected, and proportionately disconcerting. “What did he do?” Bathsheba said perforce.
“Didn’t turn his head to look at you once all the service.”
“Why should he?” again demanded her mistress, wearing a nettled look. “I didn’t ask him to.”
“Oh no. But everybody else was noticing you; and it was odd he didn’t. There, ’tis like him. Rich and gentlemanly, what does he care?”
Bathsheba dropped into a silence intended to express that she had opinions on the matter too abstruse for Liddy’s comprehension, rather than that she had nothing to say.
“Dear me—I had nearly forgotten the valentine I bought yesterday,” she exclaimed at length.
“Valentine! who for, miss?” said Liddy. “Farmer Boldwood?”
It was the single name among all possible wrong ones that just at this moment seemed to Bathsheba more pertinent than the right.