e features the wildest turmoil of a single man.

III

Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning

A consciousness of a vast impassivity in all which lay around him took
possession even of Yeobright in his wild walk towards Alderworth. He
had once before felt in his own person this overpowering of the fervid
by the inanimate; but then it had tended to enervate a passion far
sweeter than that which at present pervaded him. It was once when he
stood parting from Eustacia in the moist still levels beyond the
hills.

But dismissing all this he went onward home, and came to the front of
his house. The blinds of Eustacia's bedroom were still closely drawn,
for she was no early riser. All the life visible was in the shape of
a solitary thrush cracking a small snail upon the door-stone for his
breakfast, and his tapping seemed a loud noise in the general silence
which prevailed; but on going to the door Clym found it unfastened,
the young girl who attended upon Eustacia being astir in the back part
of the premises. Yeobright entered and went straight to his wife's
room.

The noise of his arrival must have aroused her, for when he opened the
door she was standing before the looking-glass in her night-dress, the
ends of her hair gathered into one hand, with which she was coiling
the whole mass round her head, previous to beginning toilette
operations. She was not a woman given to speaking first at a meeting,
and she allowed Clym to walk across in silence, without turning her
head. He came behind her, and she saw his face in the glass. It was
ashy, haggard, and terrible. Instead of starting towards him in
sorrowful surprise, as even Eustacia, undemonstrative wife as she was,
would have done in days before she burdened herself with a secret,
she remained motionless, looking at him in the glass. And while
she looked the carmine flush with which warmth and sound sleep had
suffused her cheeks and neck dissolved from view, and the deathlike
pallor in his face flew across into hers. He was close enough to see
this, and the sight instigated his tongue.

"You know what is the matter," he said huskily. "I see it in your
face."

Her hand relinquished the rope of hair and dropped to her side, and
the pile of tresses, no longer supported, fell from the crown of her
head about her shoulders and over the white night-gown. She made no
reply.

"Speak to me," said Yeobright peremptorily.

The blanching process did not cease in