and being, besides, very busy with the hay harvest--until one day, at
dinner-time, Henry Sisson asked if he'd started his courting; Jacob
Sowerby cried that Tony'd been too slow in getting to work, for that the
girl had been seen spooning in Crosby Shaws with Curbison the
auctioneer, and the others (there were half-a-dozen of them lounging
round the hay-waggon) burst into a boisterous guffaw. Anthony flushed
dully, looking hesitatingly from the one to the other; then slowly put
down his beer-can, and of a sudden, seizing Jacob by the neck, swung him
heavily on the grass. He fell against the waggon-wheel, and when he rose
the blood was streaming from an ugly cut in his forehead. And
henceforward Tony Garstin's courtship was the common jest of all the
parish.

As yet, however, he had scarcely spoken to her, though twice he had
passed her in the lane that led up to the vicarage. She had given him a
frank, friendly smile; but he had not found the resolution to do more
than lift his hat. He and Henry Sisson stacked the hay in the yard
behind the house; there was no further mention made of Rosa Blencarn;
but all day long Anthony, as he knelt thatching the rick, brooded over
the strange sweetness of her face, and on the fell-top, while he tramped
after the ewes over the dry, crackling heather, and as he jogged along
the narrow, rickety road, driving his cartload of lambs into the auction
mart.

Thus, as the weeks slipped by, he was content with blunt, wistful
ruminations upon her indistinct image. Jacob Sowerby's accusation, and
several kindred innuendoes let fall by his mother, left him coolly
incredulous; the girl still seemed to him altogether distant; but from
the first sight of her face he had evolved a stolid, unfaltering
conception of her difference from the ruck of her sex.