s she don't
like town girls."

"It is to wear myself out to please her! and I won't go. O, if I
could live in a gay town as a lady should, and go my own ways, and do
my own doings, I'd give the wrinkled half of my life! Yes, reddleman,
that would I."

"Help me to get Thomasin happy, miss, and the chance shall be yours,"
urged her companion.

"Chance--'tis no chance," she said proudly. "What can a poor man like
you offer me, indeed?--I am going indoors. I have nothing more to
say. Don't your horses want feeding, or your reddlebags want mending,
or don't you want to find buyers for your goods, that you stay idling
here like this?"

Venn spoke not another word. With his hands behind him he turned
away, that she might not see the hopeless disappointment in his face.
The mental clearness and power he had found in this lonely girl had
indeed filled his manner with misgiving even from the first few
minutes of close quarters with her. Her youth and situation had led
him to expect a simplicity quite at the beck of his method. But a
system of inducement which might have carried weaker country lasses
along with it had merely repelled Eustacia. As a rule, the word
Budmouth meant fascination on Egdon. That Royal port and watering
place, if truly mirrored in the minds of the heath-folk, must have
combined, in a charming and indescribable manner, a Carthaginian
bustle of building with Tarentine luxuriousness and Baian health and
beauty. Eustacia felt little less extravagantly about the place; but
she would not sink her independence to get there.

When Diggory Venn had gone quite away, Eustacia walked to the bank and
looked down the wild and picturesque vale towards the sun, which was
also in the direction of Wildeve's. The mist had now so far collapsed
that the tips of the trees and bushes around his house could just be
discerned, as if boring upwards through a vast white cobweb which
cloaked them from the day. There was no doubt that her mind was
inclined thitherward; indefinitely, fancifully--twining and untwining
about him as the single object within her horizon on which dreams
might crystallize. The man who had begun by being merely her
amusement, and would never have been more than her hobby but for his
skill in deserting her at the right moments, was now again her desire.
Cessation in his love-making had revivified her love. Such feeling
as Eustacia had idly given to Wildeve was dammed into a flood by
Thomasin. She had u