e a turn upon the hills
before it got dark; and, going out forthwith, he struck across the
heath towards Mistover.

It was an hour and a half later when he again appeared at the garden
gate. The shutters of the house were closed, and Christian Cantle,
who had been wheeling manure about the garden all day, had gone home.
On entering he found that his mother, after waiting a long time for
him, had finished her meal.

"Where have you been, Clym?" she immediately said. "Why didn't you
tell me that you were going away at this time?"

"I have been on the heath."

"You'll meet Eustacia Vye if you go up there."

Clym paused a minute. "Yes, I met her this evening," he said, as
though it were spoken under the sheer necessity of preserving honesty.

"I wondered if you had."

"It was no appointment."

"No; such meetings never are."

"But you are not angry, mother?"

"I can hardly say that I am not. Angry? No. But when I consider the
usual nature of the drag which causes men of promise to disappoint the
world I feel uneasy."

"You deserve credit for the feeling, mother. But I can assure you
that you need not be disturbed by it on my account."

"When I think of you and your new crotchets," said Mrs. Yeobright,
with some emphasis, "I naturally don't feel so comfortable as I did a
twelvemonth ago. It is incredible to me that a man accustomed to the
attractive women of Paris and elsewhere should be so easily worked
upon by a girl in a heath. You could just as well have walked another
way."

"I had been studying all day."

"Well, yes," she added more hopefully, "I have been thinking that you
might get on as a schoolmaster, and rise that way, since you really
are determined to hate the course you were pursuing."

Yeobright was unwilling to disturb this idea, though his scheme was
far enough removed from one wherein the education of youth should be
made a mere channel of social ascent. He had no desires of that sort.
He had reached the stage in a young man's life when the grimness of
the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization
of this causes ambition to halt awhile. In France it is not
uncustomary to commit suicide at this stage; in England we do much
better, or much worse, as the case may be.

The love between the young man and his mother was strangely invisible
now. Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative.
In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity