me quality left to bestow. So far the obvious thing was not
to entertain any idea of marriage with Thomasin, even to oblige her.

But this was not all. Years ago there had been in his mother's mind
a great fancy about Thomasin and himself. It had not positively
amounted to a desire, but it had always been a favourite dream. That
they should be man and wife in good time, if the happiness of neither
were endangered thereby, was the fancy in question. So that what
course save one was there now left for any son who reverenced his
mother's memory as Yeobright did? It is an unfortunate fact that any
particular whim of parents, which might have been dispersed by half
an hour's conversation during their lives, becomes sublimated by
their deaths into a fiat the most absolute, with such results to
conscientious children as those parents, had they lived, would have
been the first to decry.

Had only Yeobright's own future been involved he would have proposed
to Thomasin with a ready heart. He had nothing to lose by carrying
out a dead mother's hope. But he dreaded to contemplate Thomasin
wedded to the mere corpse of a lover that he now felt himself to be.
He had but three activities alive in him. One was his almost daily
walk to the little graveyard wherein his mother lay; another, his
just as frequent visits by night to the more distant enclosure, which
numbered his Eustacia among its dead; the third was self-preparation
for a vocation which alone seemed likely to satisfy his cravings--that
of an itinerant preacher of the eleventh commandment. It was
difficult to believe that Thomasin would be cheered by a husband with
such tendencies as these.

Yet he resolved to ask her, and let her decide for herself. It was
even with a pleasant sense of doing his duty that he went downstairs
to her one evening for this purpose, when the sun was printing on the
valley the same long shadow of the housetop that he had seen lying
there times out of number while his mother lived.

Thomasin was not in her room, and he found her in the front garden.
"I have long been wanting, Thomasin," he began, "to say something
about a matter that concerns both our futures."

"And you are going to say it now?" she remarked quickly, colouring as
she met his gaze. "Do stop a minute, Clym, and let me speak first,
for oddly enough, I have been wanting to say something to you."

"By all means say on, Tamsie."

"I suppose nobody can overhear us?" she went on, c