s desire to escape
from his past existence.

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years.
What arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than
its pathos. Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism,
he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He
thought they wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more
pertinently, who was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of
a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and
impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among
things willed.

How, then, about Tess?

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began
to oppress him. Did he reject her eternally, or did he not? He
could no longer say that he would always reject her, and not to say
that was in spirit to accept her now.

This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point of time
with her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was before she had felt
herself at liberty to trouble him with a word about her circumstances
or her feelings. He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as
to her motives in withholding intelligence, he did not inquire. Thus
her silence of docility was misinterpreted. How much it really said
if he had understood!--that she adhered with literal exactness to
orders which he had given and forgotten; that despite her natural
fearlessness she asserted no rights, admitted his judgement to be in
every respect the true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.

In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the interior of the
country, another man rode beside him. Angel's companion was also an
Englishman, bent on the same errand, though he came from another part
of the island. They were both in a state of mental depression, and
they spoke of home affairs. Confidence begat confidence. With that
curious tendency evinced by men, more especially when in distant
lands, to entrust to strangers details of their lives which they
would on no account mention to friends, Angel admitted to this man
as they rode along the sorrowful facts of his marriage.

The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more
peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the
social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the
irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial
curve. He viewed the matter in quite a different light from