etter.

"I am sure she would!" he retorted passionately. "I know her better
than you do."

"That's very likely, sir; for I have never really known her."

"Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in kindness to a lonely
wretched man!" Tess's mother again restlessly swept her cheek with
her vertical hand, and seeing that he suffered, she at last said, is
a low voice--

"She is at Sandbourne."

"Ah--where there? Sandbourne has become a large place, they say."

"I don't know more particularly than I have said--Sandbourne. For
myself, I was never there."

It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and he pressed her
no further.

"Are you in want of anything?" he said gently.

"No, sir," she replied. "We are fairly well provided for."

Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a station
three miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he walked thither.
The last train to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare
on its wheels.

LV

At eleven o'clock that night, having secured a bed at one of the
hotels and telegraphed his address to his father immediately on his
arrival, he walked out into the streets of Sandbourne. It was too
late to call on or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed
his purpose till the morning. But he could not retire to rest just
yet.

This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western
stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its
covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly
created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty.
An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at
hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a
glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up.
Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity
of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British
trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the
Caesars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's
gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.

By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding way of this new
world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against
the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the
numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It
was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on
the English