footsteps on the gravel without, and
somebody knocked at the door.

Yeobright opened it, and Venn was standing before him.

"Good morning," said the reddleman. "Is Mrs. Yeobright at home?"

Yeobright looked upon the ground. "Then you have not seen Christian or
any of the Egdon folks?" he said.

"No. I have only just returned after a long stay away. I called here the
day before I left."

"And you have heard nothing?"

"Nothing."

"My mother is--dead."

"Dead!" said Venn mechanically.

"Her home now is where I shouldn't mind having mine."

Venn regarded him, and then said, "If I didn't see your face I could
never believe your words. Have you been ill?"

"I had an illness."

"Well, the change! When I parted from her a month ago everything seemed
to say that she was going to begin a new life."

"And what seemed came true."

"You say right, no doubt. Trouble has taught you a deeper vein of talk
than mine. All I meant was regarding her life here. She has died too
soon."

"Perhaps through my living too long. I have had a bitter experience on
that score this last month, Diggory. But come in; I have been wanting to
see you."

He conducted the reddleman into the large room where the dancing had
taken place the previous Christmas, and they sat down in the settle
together. "There's the cold fireplace, you see," said Clym. "When that
half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has
been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail."

"How came she to die?" said Venn.

Yeobright gave him some particulars of her illness and death, and
continued: "After this no kind of pain will ever seem more than an
indisposition to me. I began saying that I wanted to ask you something,
but I stray from subjects like a drunken man. I am anxious to know what
my mother said to you when she last saw you. You talked with her a long
time, I think?"

"I talked with her more than half an hour."

"About me?"

"Yes. And it must have been on account of what we said that she was on
the heath. Without question she was coming to see you."

"But why should she come to see me if she felt so bitterly against me?
There's the mystery."

"Yet I know she quite forgave 'ee."

"But, Diggory--would a woman, who had quite forgiven her son, say,
when she felt herself ill on the way to his house, that she was
broken-hearted because of his ill-usage? Never!"

"What I know is that she didn't blame you a