when you have
done nothing to deserve it, that you should have got involved in such
a web as this. You were not made for these sad scenes. I am to blame
most. If I could only have saved you from it all!"

"But, Damon, please pray tell me what I must do? To sit by him hour
after hour, and hear him reproach himself as being the cause of her
death, and to know that I am the sinner, if any human being is at all,
drives me into cold despair. I don't know what to do. Should I tell
him or should I not tell him? I always am asking myself that. O, I
want to tell him; and yet I am afraid. If he find it out he must
surely kill me, for nothing else will be in proportion to his feelings
now. 'Beware the fury of a patient man' sounds day by day in my ears
as I watch him."

"Well, wait till he is better, and trust to chance. And when you
tell, you must only tell part--for his own sake."

"Which part should I keep back?"

Wildeve paused. "That I was in the house at the time," he said in a
low tone.

"Yes; it must be concealed, seeing what has been whispered. How much
easier are hasty actions than speeches that will excuse them!"

"If he were only to die--" Wildeve murmured.

"Do not think of it! I would not buy hope of immunity by so cowardly a
desire even if I hated him. Now I am going up to him again. Thomasin
bade me tell you she would be down in a few minutes. Good-bye."

She returned, and Thomasin soon appeared. When she was seated in the
gig with her husband, and the horse was turning to go off, Wildeve
lifted his eyes to the bedroom windows. Looking from one of them he
could discern a pale, tragic face watching him drive away. It was
Eustacia's.

II

A Lurid Light Breaks In upon a Darkened Understanding

Clym's grief became mitigated by wearing itself out. His strength
returned, and a month after the visit of Thomasin he might have been
seen walking about the garden. Endurance and despair, equanimity and
gloom, the tints of health and the pallor of death, mingled weirdly
in his face. He was now unnaturally silent upon all of the past that
related to his mother; and though Eustacia knew that he was thinking
of it none the less, she was only too glad to escape the topic ever to
bring it up anew. When his mind had been weaker his heart had led him
to speak out; but reason having now somewhat recovered itself he sank
into taciturnity.

One evening when he was thus standing in the garden, abstractedly
spuddi