y," she said to herself. A man
in the full swing of his activities in a gay city could not afford to
linger long on Egdon Heath. That she would behold face to face the owner
of the awakening voice within the limits of such a holiday was most
unlikely, unless she were to haunt the environs of his mother's house
like a robin, to do which was difficult and unseemly.

The customary expedient of provincial girls and men in such
circumstances is churchgoing. In an ordinary village or country town
one can safely calculate that, either on Christmas day or the Sunday
contiguous, any native home for the holidays, who has not through age or
ennui lost the appetite for seeing and being seen, will turn up in some
pew or other, shining with hope, self-consciousness, and new clothes.
Thus the congregation on Christmas morning is mostly a Tussaud
collection of celebrities who have been born in the neighbourhood.
Hither the mistress, left neglected at home all the year, can steal and
observe the development of the returned lover who has forgotten her, and
think as she watches him over her prayer book that he may throb with
a renewed fidelity when novelties have lost their charm. And hither
a comparatively recent settler like Eustacia may betake herself to
scrutinize the person of a native son who left home before her advent
upon the scene, and consider if the friendship of his parents be worth
cultivating during his next absence in order to secure a knowledge of
him on his next return.

But these tender schemes were not feasible among the scattered
inhabitants of Egdon Heath. In name they were parishioners, but
virtually they belonged to no parish at all. People who came to these
few isolated houses to keep Christmas with their friends remained
in their friends' chimney-corners drinking mead and other comforting
liquors till they left again for good and all. Rain, snow, ice, mud
everywhere around, they did not care to trudge two or three miles to
sit wet-footed and splashed to the nape of their necks among those
who, though in some measure neighbours, lived close to the church, and
entered it clean and dry. Eustacia knew it was ten to one that Clym
Yeobright would go to no church at all during his few days of leave, and
that it would be a waste of labour for her to go driving the pony and
gig over a bad road in hope to see him there.

It was dusk, and she was sitting by the fire in the dining-room or
hall, which they occupied at this