r her husband's accommodation. He
had, therefore, sent on his two-days' bride in a hired brougham, whilst
he went across the country to a certain group of wheat and barley ricks
a few miles off, telling her the hour at which he might be expected
the same evening. This accounted for her trotting out to meet him after
their separation of four hours.

By a strenuous effort, after leaving Henchard she calmed herself in
readiness to receive Donald at High-Place Hall when he came on from his
lodgings. One supreme fact empowered her to this, the sense that, come
what would, she had secured him. Half-an-hour after her arrival he
walked in, and she met him with a relieved gladness, which a month's
perilous absence could not have intensified.

"There is one thing I have not done; and yet it is important," she said
earnestly, when she had finished talking about the adventure with
the bull. "That is, broken the news of our marriage to my dear
Elizabeth-Jane."

"Ah, and you have not?" he said thoughtfully. "I gave her a lift from
the barn homewards; but I did not tell her either; for I thought
she might have heard of it in the town, and was keeping back her
congratulations from shyness, and all that."

"She can hardly have heard of it. But I'll find out; I'll go to her
now. And, Donald, you don't mind her living on with me just the same as
before? She is so quiet and unassuming."

"O no, indeed I don't," Farfrae answered with, perhaps, a faint
awkwardness. "But I wonder if she would care to?"

"O yes!" said Lucetta eagerly. "I am sure she would like to. Besides,
poor thing, she has no other home."

Farfrae looked at her and saw that she did not suspect the secret of
her more reserved friend. He liked her all the better for the blindness.
"Arrange as you like with her by all means," he said. "It is I who have
come to your house, not you to mine."

"I'll run and speak to her," said Lucetta.

When she got upstairs to Elizabeth-Jane's room the latter had taken off
her out-door things, and was resting over a book. Lucetta found in a
moment that she had not yet learnt the news.

"I did not come down to you, Miss Templeman," she said simply. "I was
coming to ask if you had quite recovered from your fright, but I found
you had a visitor. What are the bells ringing for, I wonder? And the
band, too, is playing. Somebody must be married; or else they are
practising for Christmas."

Lucetta uttered a vague "Yes," and seating herse