't there meaning in it?" she said stealthily. "What do you
think of her now?"

"Silence!" said Clym fiercely. And, turning to the boy, "And then you
left her to die?"

"No," said the woman, quickly and angrily. "He did not leave her to die!
She sent him away. Whoever says he forsook her says what's not true."

"Trouble no more about that," answered Clym, with a quivering mouth.
"What he did is a trifle in comparison with what he saw. Door kept
shut, did you say? Kept shut, she looking out of window? Good heart of
God!--what does it mean?"

The child shrank away from the gaze of his questioner.

"He said so," answered the mother, "and Johnny's a God-fearing boy and
tells no lies."

"'Cast off by my son!' No, by my best life, dear mother, it is not so!
But by your son's, your son's--May all murderesses get the torment they
deserve!"

With these words Yeobright went forth from the little dwelling. The
pupils of his eyes, fixed steadfastly on blankness, were vaguely lit
with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or less
imaginatively rendered in studies of Oedipus. The strangest deeds were
possible to his mood. But they were not possible to his situation.
Instead of there being before him the pale face of Eustacia, and a
masculine shape unknown, there was only the imperturbable countenance
of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries,
reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest
turmoil of a single man.

3--Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning

A consciousness of a vast impassivity in all which lay around him took
possession even of Yeobright in his wild walk towards Alderworth. He had
once before felt in his own person this overpowering of the fervid by
the inanimate; but then it had tended to enervate a passion far sweeter
than that which at present pervaded him. It was once when he stood
parting from Eustacia in the moist still levels beyond the hills.

But dismissing all this he went onward home, and came to the front of
his house. The blinds of Eustacia's bedroom were still closely drawn,
for she was no early riser. All the life visible was in the shape of
a solitary thrush cracking a small snail upon the door-stone for his
breakfast, and his tapping seemed a loud noise in the general silence
which prevailed; but on going to the door Clym found it unfastened, the
young girl who attended upon Eustacia being astir in the bac