to remain awake hour after hour thinking the same
thoughts. How to discover a solution to this riddle of death seemed a
query of more importance than highest problems of the living. There
was housed in his memory a vivid picture of the face of a little boy
as he entered the hovel where Clym's mother lay. The round eyes,
eager gaze, the piping voice which enunciated the words, had operated
like stilettos on his brain.

A visit to the boy suggested itself as a means of gleaning new
particulars; though it might be quite unproductive. To probe a
child's mind after the lapse of six weeks, not for facts which the
child had seen and understood, but to get at those which were in
their nature beyond him, did not promise much; yet when every obvious
channel is blocked we grope towards the small and obscure. There was
nothing else left to do; after that he would allow the enigma to drop
into the abyss of undiscoverable things.

It was about daybreak when he had reached this decision, and he
at once arose. He locked up the house and went out into the green
patch which merged in heather further on. In front of the white
garden-palings the path branched into three like a broad-arrow. The
road to the right led to the Quiet Woman and its neighbourhood; the
middle track led to Mistover Knap; the left-hand track led over
the hill to another part of Mistover, where the child lived. On
inclining into the latter path Yeobright felt a creeping chilliness,
familiar enough to most people, and probably caused by the unsunned
morning air. In after days he thought of it as a thing of singular
significance.

When Yeobright reached the cottage of Susan Nunsuch, the mother of the
boy he sought, he found that the inmates were not yet astir. But in
upland hamlets the transition from a-bed to abroad is surprisingly
swift and easy. There no dense partition of yawns and toilets divides
humanity by night from humanity by day. Yeobright tapped at the upper
window-sill, which he could reach with his walking-stick; and in three
or four minutes the woman came down.

It was not till this moment that Clym recollected her to be the person
who had behaved so barbarously to Eustacia. It partly explained the
insuavity with which the woman greeted him. Moreover, the boy had
been ailing again; and Susan now, as ever since the night when he had
been pressed into Eustacia's service at the bonfire, attributed his
indispositions to Eustacia's influence as a witch. I