The resolution was carried unanimously, and the party separated for the night. The female section made its way towards the farmhouse, for the two milkmaids employed by Farmer Bellamy in addition to his own stalwart daughters, lodged on the premises; while the men and boys betook themselves to the little cluster of houses, a kind of off-shoot from the village proper, in which they had their homes. Hannah Pethin was usually the first of that busy household to awake, and it was her duty to call her less alert companions. When, on the morning of this momentous first of April, she jumped out of bed, she stood for a moment or two rubbing her eyes and staring. There, in the centre of the very small patch of boarded floor which intervened between her bed and the door, lay a large white envelope, which bore her name in bold characters— “MISS HANNAH PETHIN.” “’Tis for me,” she said to herself, after gazing at this object for a minute or two. It generally took Hannah some little time to grasp an idea, but this one presented itself in a concrete form. “Dear, to be sure, I wonder what anyone can be writin’ to me for?” She had pulled on her stout knitted stockings, and assumed the greater part of her underwear, before it occurred to her to open the letter and ascertain its contents. Even then she grasped the paper with a diffident finger and thumb, and turned it over and over before she could make up her mind to embark on its perusal. “Dear!” she exclaimed, looking at the end in true feminine fashion, “’Tis from Giles!” Her eyes opened wider and wider as she read the line which preceded the signature. “Your true and faithful.” She turned over the page, the colour deepening in a countenance already ruddy as the brick floor of the milk-house which she so frequently scrubbed. “Well!” she ejaculated at last, drawing a long breath, “’Tis a offer—that’s what it be! Who’d ha’ thought o’ me gettin’ a offer!” She mused for a little time, her face wreathed in smiles, and spelt over the letter again with increasing satisfaction. “‘_Meet I at the Little Wood at breakfast-time to-morrow_’—that’s to-day.” Hannah’s wits were brightening under the influence of this unexpected stroke of good fortune. “‘I’d thank ye not to say nothin’ about me havin’ wrote.’. . . Well, an’ that’s well thought on. I d’ ’low I be jist so shy as he, an’ it ’ud ha’ been terr’ble arkward to ha’ talked about sich a letter as this here. . . . ‘I be wishful to take a second’—well, the man couldn’t speak plainer. . . . ‘The vittiest maid!’ _Fancy_ him sayin’ that!”