one for him--remained on
the table untasted. This was what their _agape_ had come to. At
tea, two or three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of
affection, drunk from one cup.

The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled
to, roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay.
Hastily flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and
followed, putting out the candles as if she were never coming back.
The rain was over and the night was now clear.

She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly and without
purpose. His form beside her light gray figure looked black,
sinister, and forbidding, and she felt as sarcasm the touch of the
jewels of which she had been momentarily so proud. Clare turned at
hearing her footsteps, but his recognition of her presence seemed
to make no difference to him, and he went on over the five yawning
arches of the great bridge in front of the house.

The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain
having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away.
Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick
transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining
overhead if she had not seen them there--the vastest things of the
universe imaged in objects so mean.

The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the same
valley as Talbothays, but some miles lower down the river; and the
surroundings being open, she kept easily in sight of him. Away from
the house the road wound through the meads, and along these she
followed Clare without any attempt to come up with him or to attract
him, but with dumb and vacant fidelity.

At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and
still he said nothing. The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great
after enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air
had apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse;
she knew that he saw her without irradiation--in all her bareness;
that Time was chanting his satiric psalm at her then--

Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee
shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown
shall be pain.

He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now
insufficient power