ollect on his return.

The silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more
account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the
heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a
garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of
anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.

The furze-cutter was so absorbed in the business of his journey that
he never turned his head; and his leather-legged and gauntleted form
at length became to her as nothing more than a moving handpost to
show her the way. Suddenly she was attracted to his individuality
by observing peculiarities in his walk. It was a gait she had seen
somewhere before; and the gait revealed the man to her, as the gait
of Ahimaaz in the distant plain made him known to the watchman of the
king. "His walk is exactly as my husband's used to be," she said; and
then the thought burst upon her that the furze-cutter was her son.

She was scarcely able to familiarize herself with this strange
reality. She had been told that Clym was in the habit of cutting
furze, but she had supposed that he occupied himself with the labour
only at odd times, by way of useful pastime; yet she now beheld him as
a furze-cutter and nothing more--wearing the regulation dress of the
craft, and thinking the regulation thoughts, to judge by his motions.
Planning a dozen hasty schemes for at once preserving him and Eustacia
from this mode of life she throbbingly followed the way, and saw him
enter his own door.

At one side of Clym's house was a knoll, and on the top of the knoll a
clump of fir trees so highly thrust up into the sky that their foliage
from a distance appeared as a black spot in the air above the crown
of the hill. On reaching this place Mrs. Yeobright felt distressingly
agitated, weary, and unwell. She ascended, and sat down under their
shade to recover herself, and to consider how best to break the ground
with Eustacia, so as not to irritate a woman underneath whose apparent
indolence lurked passions even stronger and more active than her own.

The trees beneath which she sat were singularly battered, rude, and
wild, and for a few minutes Mrs. Yeobright dismissed thoughts of her
own storm-broken and exhausted state to contemplate theirs. Not a
bough in the nine trees which composed the group but was splintered,
lopped, and distorted by the fierce weather that there held them at
its mercy when