"I am rather glad of that," said Venn softly, and regarding her from the
corner of his eye, "for it makes it easier for us to be friendly."

Thomasin blushed again, and, when a few more words had been said of a
not unpleasing kind, Venn mounted his horse and rode on.

This conversation had passed in a hollow of the heath near the old
Roman road, a place much frequented by Thomasin. And it might have been
observed that she did not in future walk that way less often from having
met Venn there now. Whether or not Venn abstained from riding thither
because he had met Thomasin in the same place might easily have been
guessed from her proceedings about two months later in the same year.

3--The Serious Discourse of Clym with His Cousin

Throughout this period Yeobright had more or less pondered on his duty
to his cousin Thomasin. He could not help feeling that it would be a
pitiful waste of sweet material if the tender-natured thing should be
doomed from this early stage of her life onwards to dribble away her
winsome qualities on lonely gorse and fern. But he felt this as an
economist merely, and not as a lover. His passion for Eustacia had been
a sort of conserve of his whole life, and he had nothing more of that
supreme quality left to bestow. So far the obvious thing was not to
entertain any idea of marriage with Thomasin, even to oblige her.

But this was not all. Years ago there had been in his mother's mind a
great fancy about Thomasin and himself. It had not positively amounted
to a desire, but it had always been a favourite dream. That they
should be man and wife in good time, if the happiness of neither were
endangered thereby, was the fancy in question. So that what course save
one was there now left for any son who reverenced his mother's memory
as Yeobright did? It is an unfortunate fact that any particular whim of
parents, which might have been dispersed by half an hour's conversation
during their lives, becomes sublimated by their deaths into a fiat the
most absolute, with such results to conscientious children as those
parents, had they lived, would have been the first to decry.

Had only Yeobright's own future been involved he would have proposed to
Thomasin with a ready heart. He had nothing to lose by carrying out a
dead mother's hope. But he dreaded to contemplate Thomasin wedded to the
mere corpse of a lover that he now felt himself to be. He had but three
activities alive in him. One was