bolted and locked. It was now unfastened. There was no
longer any doubt that Eustacia had left the house at this midnight
hour; and whither could she have gone? To follow her was almost
impossible. Had the dwelling stood in an ordinary road, two persons
setting out, one in each direction, might have made sure of overtaking
her; but it was a hopeless task to seek for anybody on a heath in the
dark, the practicable directions for flight across it from any point
being as numerous as the meridians radiating from the pole. Perplexed
what to do, he looked into the parlour, and was vexed to find that the
letter still lay there untouched.

At half-past eleven, finding that the house was silent, Eustacia had
lighted her candle, put on some warm outer wrappings, taken her bag in
her hand, and, extinguishing the light again, descended the staircase.
When she got into the outer air she found that it had begun to rain,
and as she stood pausing at the door it increased, threatening to come
on heavily. But having committed herself to this line of action there
was no retreating for bad weather. Even the receipt of Clym's letter
would not have stopped her now. The gloom of the night was funereal;
all nature seemed clothed in crape. The spiky points of the fir trees
behind the house rose into the sky like the turrets and pinnacles of
an abbey. Nothing below the horizon was visible save a light which
was still burning in the cottage of Susan Nunsuch.

Eustacia opened her umbrella and went out from the enclosure by
the steps over the bank, after which she was beyond all danger of
being perceived. Skirting the pool, she followed the path towards
Rainbarrow, occasionally stumbling over twisted furze-roots, tufts
of rushes, or oozing lumps of fleshy fungi, which at this season lay
scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some
colossal animal. The moon and stars were closed up by cloud and rain
to the degree of extinction. It was a night which led the traveller's
thoughts instinctively to dwell on nocturnal scenes of disaster in the
chronicles of the world, on all that is terrible and dark in history
and legend--the last plague of Egypt, the destruction of Sennacherib's
host, the agony in Gethsemane.

Eustacia at length reached Rainbarrow, and stood still there to think.
Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind
and the chaos of the world without. A sudden recollection had flashed
on her