e arrested by
the artistic perfection of the lady's appearance. Her gait, too, had
a flexuousness about it, which seemed to avoid angularity. It was a
revelation to Elizabeth that human beings could reach this stage of
external development--she had never suspected it. She felt all the
freshness and grace to be stolen from herself on the instant by the
neighbourhood of such a stranger. And this was in face of the fact that
Elizabeth could now have been writ handsome, while the young lady was
simply pretty.

Had she been envious she might have hated the woman; but she did not
do that--she allowed herself the pleasure of feeling fascinated. She
wondered where the lady had come from. The stumpy and practical walk of
honest homeliness which mostly prevailed there, the two styles of dress
thereabout, the simple and the mistaken, equally avouched that
this figure was no Casterbridge woman's, even if a book in her hand
resembling a guide-book had not also suggested it.

The stranger presently moved from the tombstone of Mrs. Henchard, and
vanished behind the corner of the wall. Elizabeth went to the tomb
herself; beside it were two footprints distinct in the soil, signifying
that the lady had stood there a long time. She returned homeward,
musing on what she had seen, as she might have mused on a rainbow or the
Northern Lights, a rare butterfly or a cameo.

Interesting as things had been out of doors, at home it turned out to
be one of her bad days. Henchard, whose two years' mayoralty was ending,
had been made aware that he was not to be chosen to fill a vacancy in
the list of aldermen; and that Farfrae was likely to become one of the
Council. This caused the unfortunate discovery that she had played the
waiting-maid in the town of which he was Mayor to rankle in his mind yet
more poisonously. He had learnt by personal inquiry at the time that
it was to Donald Farfrae--that treacherous upstart--that she had thus
humiliated herself. And though Mrs. Stannidge seemed to attach no great
importance to the incident--the cheerful souls at the Three Mariners
having exhausted its aspects long ago--such was Henchard's haughty
spirit that the simple thrifty deed was regarded as little less than a
social catastrophe by him.

Ever since the evening of his wife's arrival with her daughter there had
been something in the air which had changed his luck. That dinner at the
King's Arms with his friends had been Henchard's Austerlitz: he had