when
you are alone."

"Ah, how do you know that?" said Venn strategically.

"Because," said she, stopping to put the little girl, who had managed
to get herself upside down, right end up again, "because I do."

"You mustn't judge by folks in general," said Venn. "Still I don't
know much what feelings are now-a-days. I have got so mixed up with
business of one sort and t'other that my soft sentiments are gone off
in vapour like. Yes, I am given up body and soul to the making of
money. Money is all my dream."

"O Diggory, how wicked!" said Thomasin reproachfully, and looking at
him in exact balance between taking his words seriously and judging
them as said to tease her.

"Yes, 'tis rather a rum course," said Venn, in the bland tone of one
comfortably resigned to sins he could no longer overcome.

"You, who used to be so nice!"

"Well, that's an argument I rather like, because what a man has once
been he may be again." Thomasin blushed. "Except that it is rather
harder now," Venn continued.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because you be richer than you were at that time."

"O no--not much. I have made it nearly all over to the baby, as it
was my duty to do, except just enough to live on."

"I am rather glad of that," said Venn softly, and regarding her from
the corner of his eye, "for it makes it easier for us to be friendly."

Thomasin blushed again, and, when a few more words had been said of a
not unpleasing kind, Venn mounted his horse and rode on.

This conversation had passed in a hollow of the heath near the old
Roman road, a place much frequented by Thomasin. And it might have
been observed that she did not in future walk that way less often from
having met Venn there now. Whether or not Venn abstained from riding
thither because he had met Thomasin in the same place might easily
have been guessed from her proceedings about two months later in the
same year.

III

The Serious Discourse of Clym with His Cousin

Throughout this period Yeobright had more or less pondered on his duty
to his cousin Thomasin. He could not help feeling that it would be a
pitiful waste of sweet material if the tender-natured thing should be
doomed from this early stage of her life onwards to dribble away her
winsome qualities on lonely gorse and fern. But he felt this as an
economist merely, and not as a lover. His passion for Eustacia had
been a sort of conserve of his whole life, and he had nothing more of
that supre