Eustacia repeated in a low tone. "If you
agree not to go tonight I promise to go by myself to her house tomorrow,
and make it up with her, and wait till you fetch me."

"Why do you want to do that at this particular time, when at every
previous time that I have proposed it you have refused?"

"I cannot explain further than that I should like to see her alone
before you go," she answered, with an impatient move of her head, and
looking at him with an anxiety more frequently seen upon those of a
sanguine temperament than upon such as herself.

"Well, it is very odd that just when I had decided to go myself you
should want to do what I proposed long ago. If I wait for you to go
tomorrow another day will be lost; and I know I shall be unable to rest
another night without having been. I want to get this settled, and will.
You must visit her afterwards--it will be all the same."

"I could even go with you now?"

"You could scarcely walk there and back without a longer rest than I
shall take. No, not tonight, Eustacia."

"Let it be as you say, then," she replied in the quiet way of one who,
though willing to ward off evil consequences by a mild effort, would let
events fall out as they might sooner than wrestle hard to direct them.

Clym then went into the garden; and a thoughtful languor stole
over Eustacia for the remainder of the afternoon, which her husband
attributed to the heat of the weather.

In the evening he set out on the journey. Although the heat of summer
was yet intense the days had considerably shortened, and before he had
advanced a mile on his way all the heath purples, browns, and greens
had merged in a uniform dress without airiness or graduation, and broken
only by touches of white where the little heaps of clean quartz sand
showed the entrance to a rabbit burrow, or where the white flints of a
footpath lay like a thread over the slopes. In almost every one of
the isolated and stunted thorns which grew here and there a nighthawk
revealed his presence by whirring like the clack of a mill as long as he
could hold his breath, then stopping, flapping his wings, wheeling round
the bush, alighting, and after a silent interval of listening beginning
to whirr again. At each brushing of Clym's feet white millermoths
flew into the air just high enough to catch upon their dusty wings the
mellowed light from the west, which now shone across the depressions and
levels of the ground without falling thereon to li