fe he evidently found the young
man as desirable for comradeship as he was useful for consultations.
Donald's brightness of intellect maintained in the corn-factor the
admiration it had won at the first hour of their meeting. The poor
opinion, and but ill-concealed, that he entertained of the
slim Farfrae's physical girth, strength, and dash was more than
counterbalanced by the immense respect he had for his brains.

Her quiet eye discerned that Henchard's tigerish affection for the
younger man, his constant liking to have Farfrae near him, now and then
resulted in a tendency to domineer, which, however, was checked in a
moment when Donald exhibited marks of real offence. One day, looking
down on their figures from on high, she heard the latter remark, as they
stood in the doorway between the garden and yard, that their habit of
walking and driving about together rather neutralized Farfrae's value
as a second pair of eyes, which should be used in places where the
principal was not. "'Od damn it," cried Henchard, "what's all the world!
I like a fellow to talk to. Now come along and hae some supper, and
don't take too much thought about things, or ye'll drive me crazy."

When she walked with her mother, on the other hand, she often beheld the
Scotchman looking at them with a curious interest. The fact that he had
met her at the Three Mariners was insufficient to account for it, since
on the occasions on which she had entered his room he had never raised
his eyes. Besides, it was at her mother more particularly than
at herself that he looked, to Elizabeth-Jane's half-conscious,
simple-minded, perhaps pardonable, disappointment. Thus she could not
account for this interest by her own attractiveness, and she decided
that it might be apparent only--a way of turning his eyes that Mr.
Farfrae had.

She did not divine the ample explanation of his manner, without personal
vanity, that was afforded by the fact of Donald being the depositary
of Henchard's confidence in respect of his past treatment of the pale,
chastened mother who walked by her side. Her conjectures on that past
never went further than faint ones based on things casually heard and
seen--mere guesses that Henchard and her mother might have been lovers
in their younger days, who had quarrelled and parted.

Casterbridge, as has been hinted, was a place deposited in the
block upon a corn-field. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or
transitional intermixture