, and by an instinctive impulse of
loyalty towards her cousin Clym, to bestir herself on his account
with an alacrity unusual in her during these most sorrowful days of
her life. At the time that Eustacia was listening to the rickmakers'
conversation on Clym's return, Thomasin was climbing into a loft over
her aunt's fuel-house, where the store-apples were kept, to search out
the best and largest of them for the coming holiday-time.

The loft was lighted by a semicircular hole, through which the pigeons
crept to their lodgings in the same high quarters of the premises; and
from this hole the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure
of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft
brown fern, which, from its abundance, was used on Egdon in packing
away stores of all kinds. The pigeons were flying about her head with
the greatest unconcern, and the face of her aunt was just visible
above the floor of the loft, lit by a few stray motes of light, as she
stood half-way up the ladder, looking at a spot into which she was not
climber enough to venture.

"Now a few russets, Tamsin. He used to like them almost as well as
ribstones."

Thomasin turned and rolled aside the fern from another nook, where
more mellow fruit greeted her with its ripe smell. Before picking
them out she stopped a moment.

"Dear Clym, I wonder how your face looks now?" she said, gazing
abstractedly at the pigeon-hole, which admitted the sunlight so
directly upon her brown hair and transparent tissues that it almost
seemed to shine through her.

"If he could have been dear to you in another way," said Mrs.
Yeobright from the ladder, "this might have been a happy meeting."

"Is there any use in saying what can do no good, aunt?"

"Yes," said her aunt, with some warmth. "To thoroughly fill the air
with the past misfortune, so that other girls may take warning and
keep clear of it."

Thomasin lowered her face to the apples again. "I am a warning to
others, just as thieves and drunkards and gamblers are," she said in
a low voice. "What a class to belong to! Do I really belong to them?
'Tis absurd! Yet why, aunt, does everybody keep on making me think
that I do, by the way they behave towards me? Why don't people judge
me by my acts? Now, look at me as I kneel here, picking up these
apples--do I look like a lost woman?... I wish all good women were as
good as I!" she added vehemently.

"Strangers don't see you as I do," s