ill-conceived
world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted
and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven
to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at
all!"

The distant light which Eustacia had cursorily observed in leaving
the house came, as she had divined, from the cottage window of Susan
Nunsuch. What Eustacia did not divine was the occupation of the woman
within at that moment. Susan's sight of her passing figure earlier
in the evening, not five minutes after the sick boy's exclamation,
"Mother, I do feel so bad!" persuaded the matron that an evil
influence was certainly exercised by Eustacia's propinquity.

On this account Susan did not go to bed as soon as the evening's work
was over, as she would have done at ordinary times. To counteract
the malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, the
boy's mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition,
calculated to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on any
human being against whom it was directed. It was a practice well
known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at the
present day.

She passed with her candle into an inner room, where, among other
utensils, were two large brown pans, containing together perhaps a
hundredweight of liquid honey, the produce of the bees during the
foregoing summer. On a shelf over the pans was a smooth and solid
yellow mass of a hemispherical form, consisting of beeswax from the
same take of honey. Susan took down the lump, and cutting off several
thin slices, heaped them in an iron ladle, with which she returned
to the living-room, and placed the vessel in the hot ashes of the
fireplace. As soon as the wax had softened to the plasticity of dough
she kneaded the pieces together. And now her face became more intent.
She began moulding the wax; and it was evident from her manner of
manipulation that she was endeavouring to give it some preconceived
form. The form was human.

By warming and kneading, cutting and twisting, dismembering and
re-joining the incipient image she had in about a quarter of an hour
produced a shape which tolerably well resembled a woman, and was
about six inches high. She laid it on the table to get cold and hard.
Meanwhile she took the candle and went upstairs to where the little
boy was lying.

"Did you notice, my dear, what Mrs. Eustacia wore this afternoon
besides the dark