tience of
a person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. "Don't
come close to me, Angel! No--you must not. Keep away."

"But don't you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled
down by illness? You are not so fickle--I am come on purpose for
you--my mother and father will welcome you now!"

"Yes--O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late."

She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move
away, but cannot. "Don't you know all--don't you know it? Yet how
do you come here if you do not know?"

"I inquired here and there, and I found the way."

"I waited and waited for you," she went on, her tones suddenly
resuming their old fluty pathos. "But you did not come! And I wrote
to you, and you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come
any more, and that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me,
and to mother, and to all of us after father's death. He--"

"I don't understand."

"He has won me back to him."

Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged
like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands,
which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate.

She continued--

"He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie--that you
would not come again; and you HAVE come! These clothes are what he's
put upon me: I didn't care what he did wi' me! But--will you go
away, Angel, please, and never come any more?"

They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with
a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to
shelter them from reality.

"Ah--it is my fault!" said Clare.

But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But
he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear
to him till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to
recognize the body before him as hers--allowing it to drift, like a
corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living
will.

A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone. His face
grew colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment,
and a minute or two after, he found himself in the street, walking
along he did not know whither.

LVI

Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The Herons and owner
of all the handsome furniture, was not a person of an unusually
curious turn of mind. She was too deeply materialized, poor woman,
by her l