When Adam, after stopping a while to chat with the Poysers, had said
good-night, Mr. Poyser remarked, "If you can catch Adam for a husband,
Hetty, you'll ride i' your own spring-cart some day, I'll be your
warrant."

Her uncle did not see the little toss of the head with which Hetty
answered him. To ride in a spring-cart seemed a very miserable lot
indeed to her now.

It was on August 18, when Adam, going home from some work he had been
doing at one of the farms, passed through a grove of beeches, and saw,
at the end of the avenue, about twenty yards before him, two figures.
They were standing opposite to each other with clasped hands, and they
separated with a start at a sharp bark from Adam Bede's dog. One hurried
away through a gate out of the grove; the other, Arthur Donnithorne,
looking flushed and excited, sauntered towards Adam. The young squire
had been home for some weeks celebrating his twenty-first birthday, and
he was leaving on the morrow to rejoin his regiment.

Hitherto there had been a cordial and sincere liking and a mutual esteem
between the two young men; but now Adam stood as if petrified, and his
amazement turned quickly to fierceness.

Arthur tried to pass the matter off lightly, as if it had been a chance
meeting with Hetty; but Adam, who felt that he had been robbed
treacherously by the man in whom he had trusted, would not so easily let
him off. It came to blows, and Arthur sank under a well-planted blow of
Adam's, as a steel rod is broken by an iron bar.

Before they separated, Arthur promised that he would write and tell