before me!"

"I understand you," said Eustacia, breathless with emotion. "You
think me capable of every bad thing. Who can be worse than a wife
who encourages a lover, and poisons her husband's mind against his
relative? Yet that is now the character given to me. Will you not
come and drag him out of my hands?"

Mrs. Yeobright gave back heat for heat.

"Don't rage at me, madam! It ill becomes your beauty, and I am not
worth the injury you may do it on my account, I assure you. I am only
a poor old woman who has lost a son."

"If you had treated me honourably you would have had him still."
Eustacia said, while scalding tears trickled from her eyes. "You have
brought yourself to folly; you have caused a division which can never
be healed!"

"I have done nothing. This audacity from a young woman is more than I
can bear."

"It was asked for; you have suspected me, and you have made me speak
of my husband in a way I would not have done. You will let him know
that I have spoken thus, and it will cause misery between us. Will
you go away from me? You are no friend!"

"I will go when I have spoken a word. If anyone says I have come
here to question you without good grounds for it, that person speaks
untruly. If anyone says that I attempted to stop your marriage by any
but honest means, that person, too, does not speak the truth. I have
fallen on an evil time; God has been unjust to me in letting you
insult me! Probably my son's happiness does not lie on this side of
the grave, for he is a foolish man who neglects the advice of his
parent. You, Eustacia, stand on the edge of a precipice without
knowing it. Only show my son one-half the temper you have shown me
today--and you may before long--and you will find that though he is
as gentle as a child with you now, he can be as hard as steel!"

The excited mother then withdrew, and Eustacia, panting, stood looking
into the pool.

II

He Is Set Upon by Adversities; but He Sings a Song

The result of that unpropitious interview was that Eustacia, instead
of passing the afternoon with her grandfather, hastily returned home
to Clym, where she arrived three hours earlier than she had been
expected.

She came indoors with her face flushed, and her eyes still showing
traces of her recent excitement. Yeobright looked up astonished; he
had never seen her in any way approaching to that state before. She
passed him by, and would have gone upstairs unnoticed, but Clym w