he furze-cutter was her son.

She was scarcely able to familiarize herself with this strange reality.
She had been told that Clym was in the habit of cutting furze, but she
had supposed that he occupied himself with the labour only at odd times,
by way of useful pastime; yet she now beheld him as a furze-cutter and
nothing more--wearing the regulation dress of the craft, and thinking
the regulation thoughts, to judge by his motions. Planning a dozen hasty
schemes for at once preserving him and Eustacia from this mode of life,
she throbbingly followed the way, and saw him enter his own door.

At one side of Clym's house was a knoll, and on the top of the knoll a
clump of fir trees so highly thrust up into the sky that their foliage
from a distance appeared as a black spot in the air above the crown
of the hill. On reaching this place Mrs. Yeobright felt distressingly
agitated, weary, and unwell. She ascended, and sat down under their
shade to recover herself, and to consider how best to break the ground
with Eustacia, so as not to irritate a woman underneath whose apparent
indolence lurked passions even stronger and more active than her own.

The trees beneath which she sat were singularly battered, rude, and
wild, and for a few minutes Mrs. Yeobright dismissed thoughts of her own
storm-broken and exhausted state to contemplate theirs. Not a bough in
the nine trees which composed the group but was splintered, lopped,
and distorted by the fierce weather that there held them at its mercy
whenever it prevailed. Some were blasted and split as if by lightning,
black stains as from fire marking their sides, while the ground at their
feet was strewn with dead fir-needles and heaps of cones blown down in
the gales of past years. The place was called the Devil's Bellows, and
it was only necessary to come there on a March or November night to
discover the forcible reasons for that name. On the present heated
afternoon, when no perceptible wind was blowing, the trees kept up a
perpetual moan which one could hardly believe to be caused by the air.

Here she sat for twenty minutes or more ere she could summon resolution
to go down to the door, her courage being lowered to zero by her
physical lassitude. To any other person than a mother it might have
seemed a little humiliating that she, the elder of the two women, should
be the first to make advances. But Mrs. Yeobright had well considered
all that, and she only thought how best t