t.

In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the bedstead,
remained talking with them awhile, till, seeing that no more could
be done to make them comfortable just then, she walked about the
churchyard, now beginning to be embrowned by the shades of nightfall.
The door of the church was unfastened, and she entered it for the
first time in her life.

Within the window under which the bedstead stood were the tombs of
the family, covering in their dates several centuries. They were
canopied, altar-shaped, and plain; their carvings being defaced
and broken; their brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes
remaining like martin-holes in a sandcliff. Of all the reminders
that she had ever received that her people were socially extinct,
there was none so forcible as this spoliation.

She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed:

OSTIUM SEPULCHRI ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D'URBERVILLE

Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she knew that
this was the door of her ancestral sepulchre, and that the tall
knights of whom her father had chanted in his cups lay inside.

She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the
oldest of them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she
had not noticed it before, and would hardly have noticed it now but
for an odd fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew close
to it she discovered all in a moment that the figure was a living
person; and the shock to her sense of not having been alone was so
violent that she was quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting,
not, however, till she had recognized Alec d'Urberville in the form.

He leapt off the slab and supported her.

"I saw you come in," he said smiling, "and got up there not to
interrupt your meditations. A family gathering, is it not, with
these old fellows under us here? Listen."

He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor; whereupon there arose
a hollow echo from below.

"That shook them a bit, I'll warrant!" he continued. "And you
thought I was the mere stone reproduction of one of them. But no.
The old order changeth. The little finger of the sham d'Urberville
can do more for you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath...
Now command me. What shall I do?"

"Go away!" she murmured.

"I will--I'll look for your mother," said he blandly. But in passing
her he whispered: "Mind this; you'll be civil yet!"

When he was gone she bent down u