Then there was a silence of some duration, though both were too busy with their own thoughts to notice it; till at length Joe remembered that the purpose of their expedition was fulfilled, and asked his companion if she did not think they had better return. Betsey was ready to think whatever her Joe thought, leaning up with an undesirable closeness that warm day, and softly fanning their joint countenances with a fond and lingering motion of her fan. In time she heaved a sigh, deep and full of overflowing enjoyment, and then she spoke. "Do you know, Joe dear, you have given me a great surprise to-day?" Joe's tight-strained feelings had run themselves down now. He felt--"tired in his inside," I fear, would have been his inelegant expression, and longed for a glass of beer. He felt incapable of conversation, and even a little grumpy, perhaps. Such strange and inconsistent creatures are the men. Betsey's over-wroughtness was quite of another kind. Her nervous excitement, once fairly past the turn of the tide, was inclined, as Hamlet would have had his solid flesh incline, to "melt and dissolve itself into a dew"--of verbiage and watery talk. It was of a soliloquizing tendency, too, which, though prone to questionings, passed on from one to the next, indifferent to non-reply. "This has been all a great surprise; I never thought that you really cared for me. Was it not strange?" and she looked up in his face grown stolid, and beginning to show unmistakable signs of crossness, and fanned him fondly, smiling into dimples, like the rapturous maidens in "Patience," when they enthral their poet with garlands. "I thought it would have been the pretty Miss Savergne, you were so attentive to----" "She would not marry a poor man, and a poor man, could not afford to marry _her_," and then Joe stopped. He would have liked to kick himself for an unmannerly brute; for alas! the soft impeachment was all too true. He coughed and spluttered. Fortunately, Betsey was too full of her own pleasant reflections to heed anything, but he felt he must get away and calm down, or something worse might escape him which would not pass unnoticed, so he pulled up by the road-side just on the outskirts of the village. "Would you mind if I set you down here, Betsey? It is getting late. The calves should have been watered an hour ago, and Baptiste and Laurent are both away." "To be sure, Joe! A farmer's wife must take an interest in the calves, and I mean to do my duty," and she sprang gaily out, and stood looking after the man and outfit as they trotted off, with a sense of proprietorship which was new and very pleasant. The rector and his wife delayed their dinner half-an-hour, and then sat down, wondering what had become of Betsey. They had nearly finished when she whirled in, a tumultuous arrangement of white muslin and enthusiasm.