loved him--how anxious I
was to have him--and how wrung I was between caring so much for him
and my wish to be fair to him!"

Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank, a
helpless thing, into a chair.

"Well, well; what's done can't be undone! I'm sure I don't know why
children o' my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than
other people's--not to know better than to blab such a thing as
that, when he couldn't ha' found it out till too late!" Here Mrs
Durbeyfield began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to
be pitied. "What your father will say I don't know," she continued;
"for he's been talking about the wedding up at Rolliver's and The
Pure Drop every day since, and about his family getting back to their
rightful position through you--poor silly man!--and now you've made
this mess of it! The Lord-a-Lord!"

As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard
approaching at that moment. He did not, however, enter immediately,
and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him
herself, Tess keeping out of sight for the present. After her first
burst of disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had
taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday
or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them
irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be
borne with; not a lesson.

Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds had been
shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had been adapted for
two younger children. There was no place here for her now.

The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on
there. Presently her father entered, apparently carrying in a live
hen. He was a foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his
second horse, and he travelled with his basket on his arm. The hen
had been carried about this morning as it was often carried, to show
people that he was in his work, though it had lain, with its legs
tied, under the table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.

"We've just had up a story about--" Durbeyfield began, and thereupon
related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the
inn about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having
married into a clerical family. "They was formerly styled 'sir',
like my own ancestry," he said, "though nowadays their true style,
strictly speaking, is 'clerk' only."