sent. When soon after,
the girl rejoined her mother, the latter was still in thought--on quite
another matter than a young man's song.

"We've made a mistake," she whispered (that the Scotch-man might not
overhear). "On no account ought ye to have helped serve here to-night.
Not because of ourselves, but for the sake of him. If he should befriend
us, and take us up, and then find out what you did when staying here,
'twould grieve and wound his natural pride as Mayor of the town."

Elizabeth, who would perhaps have been more alarmed at this than her
mother had she known the real relationship, was not much disturbed about
it as things stood. Her "he" was another man than her poor mother's.
"For myself," she said, "I didn't at all mind waiting a little upon him.
He's so respectable, and educated--far above the rest of 'em in the inn.
They thought him very simple not to know their grim broad way of talking
about themselves here. But of course he didn't know--he was too refined
in his mind to know such things!" Thus she earnestly pleaded.

Meanwhile, the "he" of her mother was not so far away as even they
thought. After leaving the Three Mariners he had sauntered up and down
the empty High Street, passing and repassing the inn in his promenade.
When the Scotchman sang his voice had reached Henchard's ears through
the heart-shaped holes in the window-shutters, and had led him to pause
outside them a long while.

"To be sure, to be sure, how that fellow does draw me!" he had said to
himself. "I suppose 'tis because I'm so lonely. I'd have given him a
third share in the business to have stayed!"

9.

When Elizabeth-Jane opened the hinged casement next morning the mellow
air brought in the feel of imminent autumn almost as distinctly as if
she had been in the remotest hamlet. Casterbridge was the complement of
the rural life around, not its urban opposite. Bees and butterflies in
the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads
at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down High
Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing
strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated
into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains,
and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and
stole through people's doorways into their passages with a hesitating
scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.