ling about half a mile off; but he did not
appear. It was almost with heart-sickness that she came home and with
a sense of shame at her weakness. She resolved to look for the man
from Paris no more.

But Providence is nothing if not coquettish; and no sooner had
Eustacia formed this resolve than the opportunity came which, while
sought, had been entirely withholden.

IV

Eustacia Is Led On to an Adventure

In the evening of this last day of expectation, which was the
twenty-third of December, Eustacia was at home alone. She had
passed the recent hour in lamenting over a rumour newly come to
her ears--that Yeobright's visit to his mother was to be of short
duration, and would end some time the next week. "Naturally," she
said to herself. A man in the full swing of his activities in a gay
city could not afford to linger long on Egdon Heath. That she would
behold face to face the owner of the awakening voice within the limits
of such a holiday was most unlikely, unless she were to haunt the
environs of his mother's house like a robin, to do which was difficult
and unseemly.

The customary expedient of provincial girls and men in such
circumstances is churchgoing. In an ordinary village or country town
one can safely calculate that, either on Christmas-day or the Sunday
contiguous, any native home for the holidays, who has not through age
or _ennui_ lost the appetite for seeing and being seen, will turn
up in some pew or other, shining with hope, self-consciousness, and
new clothes. Thus the congregation on Christmas morning is mostly
a Tussaud collection of celebrities who have been born in the
neighbourhood. Hither the mistress, left neglected at home all the
year, can steal and observe the development of the returned lover who
has forgotten her, and think as she watches him over her prayer-book
that he may throb with a renewed fidelity when novelties have lost
their charm. And hither a comparatively recent settler like Eustacia
may betake herself to scrutinize the person of a native son who left
home before her advent upon the scene, and consider if the friendship
of his parents be worth cultivating during his next absence in order
to secure a knowledge of him on his next return.

But these tender schemes were not feasible among the scattered
inhabitants of Egdon Heath. In name they were parishioners, but
virtually they belonged to no parish at all. People who came to these
few isolated houses to keep C