it being now dark, he diverged to the left till
he stood behind a holly-bush on the edge of a pit not twenty yards
from Rainbarrow.

He watched for a meeting there, but he watched in vain. Nobody except
himself came near the spot that night.

But the loss of his labour produced little effect upon the reddleman.
He had stood in the shoes of Tantalus, and seemed to look upon
a certain mass of disappointment as the natural preface to all
realizations, without which preface they would give cause for alarm.

The same hour the next evening found him again at the same place; but
Eustacia and Wildeve, the expected trysters, did not appear.

He pursued precisely the same course yet four nights longer, and
without success. But on the next, being the day-week of their
previous meeting, he saw a female shape floating along the ridge and
the outline of a young man ascending from the valley. They met in the
little ditch encircling the tumulus--the original excavation from
which it had been thrown up by the ancient British people.

The reddleman, stung with suspicion of wrong to Thomasin, was aroused
to strategy in a moment. He instantly left the bush and crept forward
on his hands and knees. When he had got as close as he might safely
venture without discovery he found that, owing to a cross-wind, the
conversation of the trysting pair could not be overheard.

Near him, as in divers places about the heath, were areas strewn with
large turves, which lay edgeways and upside down awaiting removal by
Timothy Fairway, previous to the winter weather. He took two of these
as he lay, and dragged them over him till one covered his head and
shoulders, the other his back and legs. The reddleman would now have
been quite invisible, even by daylight; the turves, standing upon him
with the heather upwards, looked precisely as if they were growing.
He crept along again, and the turves upon his back crept with him.
Had he approached without any covering the chances are that he would
not have been perceived in the dusk; approaching thus, it was as
though he burrowed underground. In this manner he came quite close to
where the two were standing.

"Wish to consult me on the matter?" reached his ears in the rich,
impetuous accents of Eustacia Vye. "Consult me? It is an indignity
to me to talk so: I won't bear it any longer!" She began weeping.
"I have loved you, and have shown you that I loved you, much to my
regret; and yet you can come and say