went upstairs, changed his dark clothes for his white, his thin boots
for his thick, and proceeded to his customary work for the afternoon.

But in the cathedral he seemed to hear a voice behind him, and to
be possessed with an idea that she would come back. She could not
possibly go home with Phillotson, he fancied. The feeling grew and
stirred. The moment that the clock struck the last of his working
hours he threw down his tools and rushed homeward. "Has anybody been
for me?" he asked.

Nobody had been there.

As he could claim the downstairs sitting-room till twelve o'clock
that night he sat in it all the evening; and even when the clock had
struck eleven, and the family had retired, he could not shake off
the feeling that she would come back and sleep in the little room
adjoining his own in which she had slept so many previous days. Her
actions were always unpredictable: why should she not come? Gladly
would he have compounded for the denial of her as a sweetheart and
wife by having her live thus as a fellow-lodger and friend, even on
the most distant terms. His supper still remained spread, and going
to the front door, and softly setting it open, he returned to the
room and sat as watchers sit on Old-Midsummer eves, expecting the
phantom of the Beloved. But she did not come.

Having indulged in this wild hope he went upstairs, and looked out of
the window, and pictured her through the evening journey to London,
whither she and Phillotson had gone for their holiday; their rattling
along through the damp night to their hotel, under the same sky of
ribbed cloud as that he beheld, through which the moon showed its
position rather than its shape, and one or two of the larger stars
made themselves visible as faint nebulae only. It was a new
beginning of Sue's history. He projected his mind into the future,
and saw her with children more or less in her own likeness around
her. But the consolation of regarding them as a continuation of
her identity was denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the
wilfulness of Nature in not allowing issue from one parent alone.
Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.
"If at the estrangement or death of my lost love, I could go and see
her child--hers solely--there would be comfort in it!" said Jude.
And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and
more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man's finer emotions, and her
la