oll
out three or four miles to meet him and help carry anything for'n;
though I suppose he's altered from the boy he was. They say he can talk
French as fast as a maid can eat blackberries; and if so, depend upon it
we who have stayed at home shall seem no more than scroff in his eyes."

"Coming across the water to Budmouth by steamer, isn't he?"

"Yes; but how he's coming from Budmouth I don't know."

"That's a bad trouble about his cousin Thomasin. I wonder such a
nice-notioned fellow as Clym likes to come home into it. What a
nunnywatch we were in, to be sure, when we heard they weren't married
at all, after singing to 'em as man and wife that night! Be dazed if
I should like a relation of mine to have been made such a fool of by a
man. It makes the family look small."

"Yes. Poor maid, her heart has ached enough about it. Her health is
suffering from it, I hear, for she will bide entirely indoors. We never
see her out now, scampering over the furze with a face as red as a rose,
as she used to do."

"I've heard she wouldn't have Wildeve now if he asked her."

"You have? 'Tis news to me."

While the furze-gatherers had desultorily conversed thus Eustacia's
face gradually bent to the hearth in a profound reverie, her toe
unconsciously tapping the dry turf which lay burning at her feet.

The subject of their discourse had been keenly interesting to her. A
young and clever man was coming into that lonely heath from, of all
contrasting places in the world, Paris. It was like a man coming from
heaven. More singular still, the heathmen had instinctively coupled her
and this man together in their minds as a pair born for each other.

That five minutes of overhearing furnished Eustacia with visions enough
to fill the whole blank afternoon. Such sudden alternations from mental
vacuity do sometimes occur thus quietly. She could never have believed
in the morning that her colourless inner world would before night become
as animated as water under a microscope, and that without the arrival of
a single visitor. The words of Sam and Humphrey on the harmony between
the unknown and herself had on her mind the effect of the invading
Bard's prelude in the Castle of Indolence, at which myriads of
imprisoned shapes arose where had previously appeared the stillness of a
void.

Involved in these imaginings she knew nothing of time. When she became
conscious of externals it was dusk. The furze-rick was finished; the men
had gone