me? Do you
care for me? I wish you would prove it in some way."

"How can I prove it more than I have done?" she cried, in a
distraction of tenderness. "Will this prove it more?"

She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learnt what an
impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she
loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.

"There--now do you believe?" she asked, flushed, and wiping her eyes.

"Yes. I never really doubted--never, never!"

So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the
sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against
them. She had consented. She might as well have agreed at first.
The "appetite for joy" which pervades all creation, that tremendous
force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the
helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over
the social rubric.

"I must write to my mother," she said. "You don't mind my doing
that?"

"Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know
how very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how
wrong it would be in me to object. Where does she live?"

"At the same place--Marlott. On the further side of Blackmoor Vale."

"Ah, then I HAVE seen you before this summer--"

"Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not dance with me.
O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!"

XXXI

Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter to her mother the very
next day, and by the end of the week a response to her communication
arrived in Joan Durbeyfield's wandering last-century hand.

DEAR TESS,--

J write these few lines Hoping they will find you well,
as they leave me at Present, thank God for it. Dear
Tess, we are all glad to Hear that you are going really
to be married soon. But with respect to your question,
Tess, J say between ourselves, quite private but very
strong, that on no account do you say a word of your
Bygone Trouble to him. J did not tell everything
to your Father, he being so Proud on account of his
Respectability, which, perhaps, your Intended is
the same. Many a woman--some of the Highest in the
Land--have had a Trouble in their time; and why should
you Trumpet yours when others don't Trumpet theirs? No
girl would be such a Fool, specially as it is so long
ago, and not your Fault at all. J shall answer the
sam