She lowered her own that were not in the habit of falling before any one’s gaze, and her laugh was less confident as she added: “There’s earnin’ as well as elpin’, ye see.” “Oh, I say, ’ow much o’ your earnin’s gone ’ome, eh, ’Melia?” sneered a fat girl hard by; but her mouth was stopped by a young fellow who brushed past her quickly, and, stooping over ’Melia, pulled a hop-pole out of the ground for her that was trying even her strength, and laid it across for her ready to pick. The elder man, who was going on steadily with his own work, smiled a little, and the girl who had spoken cried out, “Lor! it ain’t every one of us gets _that_ done for us!” ’Melia looked a little conscious as she said, "Ye ’adn’t no call to do it, thank ye, Mr. Farr. Mr. Wilkins ’ere"—nodding towards the other man—“lays ’em ready for us.” But she looked pleased as any other girl would have looked, and blushed a bit under her brown skin at something the fellow said to her in an undertone. The girls around sniggered and whispered together, but the next minute ’Melia threw her jokes and laughter around her in just the same wholesale and indiscriminate manner as usual, and the lads took heart of grace again and gathered round her—each confident that he could oust the stranger from her favour—and she was, as always, the centre of life and fun and banter. Only he whom she had called Mr. Wilkins held aloof, and went on steadily with his work without paying her any attention, without even laying the poles as near to her hand as he did to that of many another girl, and she—strange to say—never flung him even one of her lightly casual words, never appealed to him for his opinion, as she laughingly did to so many others. “A good ’usband?” she was saying now with her merriest manner. “Well, now, I wonder what sort that’d be? Some tell ye one thing and some another, till ye don’t know what to believe, ’pon my word ye don’t. ’Ere be Johnnie says he’ll give me every blessed thing I can want; but, Lor’ bless me, ’ow can I tell what I shall want? A proper man ’d find out for ye, and give it ye into the bargain!” The laugh went round louder than ever at this, and Johnnie declared he would find out fast enough; but he was told that as he had never made a good shot at her tastes yet she wasn’t likely to have any confidence in him for the future, and Johnnie, crestfallen, fell into the rear. “Nay,” continued she, “there be some as’ll tell ye a woman be happiest when the man leads her a devil’s life; but there, I say it be according to taste again, and ’ow am I to know till I’ve tried? No, no, there be many a lad’s good for a day’s larking that’d never do to settle down with! So ye may all take it I mean to lark around a bit more yet awhile, and there be no tellin’ at all who I shall take in the end.”