and the lady with black
hair looked out of the side window at her."

The boy's mother turned to Clym and said, "This is something you
didn't expect?"

Yeobright took no more notice of her than if he had been of stone.
"Go on, go on," he said hoarsely to the boy.

"And when she saw the young lady look out of the window the old lady
knocked again; and when nobody came she took up the furze-hook and
looked at it, and put it down again, and then she looked at the
faggot-bonds; and then she went away, and walked across to me, and
blowed her breath very hard, like this. We walked on together, she
and I, and I talked to her and she talked to me a bit, but not much,
because she couldn't blow her breath."

"O!" murmured Clym, in a low tone, and bowed his head. "Let's have
more," he said.

"She couldn't talk much, and she couldn't walk; and her face was, O
so queer!"

"How was her face?"

"Like yours is now."

The woman looked at Yeobright, and beheld him colourless, in a cold
sweat. "Isn't there meaning in it?" she said stealthily. "What do
you think of her now?"

"Silence!" said Clym fiercely. And, turning to the boy, "And then you
left her to die?"

"No," said the woman, quickly and angrily. "He did not leave her to
die! She sent him away. Whoever says he forsook her says what's not
true."

"Trouble no more about that," answered Clym, with a quivering mouth.
"What he did is a trifle in comparison with what he saw. Door kept
shut, did you say? Kept shut, she looking out of window? Good heart
of God!--what does it mean?"

The child shrank away from the gaze of his questioner.

"He said so," answered the mother, "and Johnny's a God-fearing boy
and tells no lies."

"'Cast off by my son!' No, by my best life, dear mother, it is not so!
But by your son's, your son's--May all murderesses get the torment
they deserve!"

With these words Yeobright went forth from the little dwelling. The
pupils of his eyes, fixed steadfastly on blankness, were vaguely
lit with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or
less imaginatively rendered in studies of Oedipus. The strangest
deeds were possible to his mood. But they were not possible to
his situation. Instead of there being before him the pale face
of Eustacia, and a masculine shape unknown, there was only the
imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the
cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its
seamed and antiqu