ever after! Chuckling over her own ingenuousness, she hurried on her way. She had no eye for the beauty of the late summer evening, that so dusted with gold the hills that they might all have been one rolling field of standing corn, but hurried on, her mind full of her own small and artful schemes, and dwelling with relish on the thought of Clare and Lovel estranged within a stone’s throw of one another in the village she had left behind her. Her gauge of Mrs. Quince’s irritability had been very accurate. The other parcels duly handed over, Mrs. Quince had demanded her thread, of which, she declared, she had not a morsel left in the house. She inveighed against Calladine, who was so impatient that he daily enquired when the new curtains would be finished, but she inveighed still more against Daisy, who, she exclaimed, must be bereft of all ordinary sense to forget any item of so careful a list as she, Mrs. Quince, had herself prepared. Well, there was no help for it: back Daisy must go, and that no later than to-morrow, for besides the curtains there was all the mending to be done, and if she got a corn or a blister tramping the extra six miles she would only have herself to blame. Daisy made no complaint. She was beginning to feel herself a match for them all, for if she could outwit Mrs. Quince, who was a woman, how much more easily would she be able to outwit Lovel, who was only a man? Accordingly she started out on the following day, ostensibly penitent but inwardly triumphant, and slung down the hill, leaving on its height Starvecrow with its blown thorn trees and Calladine swinging his pick in the garden. The only thought which pre-occupied her, was where to find Lovel, for as she knew, his occupations took him in many various directions, and he was just as likely to be driving a herd into Marlborough to market as watching sheep on the Downs. Olver, however, she could be tolerably certain of finding in the village, and he, at least, might know his brother’s whereabouts. On the way she retrieved the packet of thread from its hiding place in the stack, since she was too thrifty a soul to waste her own money in buying a new lot from the shop, and as she climbed rather laboriously back over the hurdles, she saw Lovel himself riding idly towards her up the green track.