d. He had been sorry
for all this long ago; but his attempts to replace ambition by love had
been as fully foiled as his ambition itself. His wronged wife had foiled
them by a fraud so grandly simple as to be almost a virtue. It was an
odd sequence that out of all this tampering with social law came that
flower of Nature, Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his hands of
life arose from his perception of its contrarious inconsistencies--of
Nature's jaunty readiness to support unorthodox social principles.

He intended to go on from this place--visited as an act of penance--into
another part of the country altogether. But he could not help thinking
of Elizabeth, and the quarter of the horizon in which she lived. Out of
this it happened that the centrifugal tendency imparted by weariness of
the world was counteracted by the centripetal influence of his love
for his stepdaughter. As a consequence, instead of following a straight
course yet further away from Casterbridge, Henchard gradually, almost
unconsciously, deflected from that right line of his first intention;
till, by degrees, his wandering, like that of the Canadian woodsman,
became part of a circle of which Casterbridge formed the centre. In
ascending any particular hill he ascertained the bearings as nearly as
he could by means of the sun, moon, or stars, and settled in his mind
the exact direction in which Casterbridge and Elizabeth-Jane lay.
Sneering at himself for his weakness he yet every hour--nay, every few
minutes--conjectured her actions for the time being--her sitting down
and rising up, her goings and comings, till thought of Newson's and
Farfrae's counter-influence would pass like a cold blast over a pool,
and efface her image. And then he would say to himself, "O you fool! All
this about a daughter who is no daughter of thine!"

At length he obtained employment at his own occupation of hay-trusser,
work of that sort being in demand at this autumn time. The scene of his
hiring was a pastoral farm near the old western highway, whose course
was the channel of all such communications as passed between the busy
centres of novelty and the remote Wessex boroughs. He had chosen the
neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at
a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare
was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.

And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which