ong and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon
Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own sake, and
apart from possible lodgers' pockets. Nevertheless, the visit of
Angel Clare to her well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d'Urberville, as
she deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of time and
manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity which had been stifled
down as useless save in its bearings to the letting trade.

Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without entering
the dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who stood within the partly-closed
door of her own sitting-room at the back of the passage, could
hear fragments of the conversation--if conversation it could be
called--between those two wretched souls. She heard Tess re-ascend
the stairs to the first floor, and the departure of Clare, and the
closing of the front door behind him. Then the door of the room
above was shut, and Mrs Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her
apartment. As the young lady was not fully dressed, Mrs Brooks knew
that she would not emerge again for some time.

She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood at the door of
the front room--a drawing-room, connected with the room immediately
behind it (which was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common
manner. This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks's best apartments,
had been taken by the week by the d'Urbervilles. The back room was
now in silence; but from the drawing-room there came sounds.

All that she could at first distinguish of them was one syllable,
continually repeated in a low note of moaning, as if it came from a
soul bound to some Ixionian wheel--

"O--O--O!"

Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again--

"O--O--O!"

The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small space of the
room inside was visible, but within that space came a corner of the
breakfast table, which was already spread for the meal, and also a
chair beside. Over the seat of the chair Tess's face was bowed, her
posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands were clasped
over her head, the skirts of her dressing-gown and the embroidery of
her night-gown flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless
feet, from which the slippers had fallen, protruded upon the carpet.
It was from her lips that came the murmur of unspeakable despair.

Then a man's voice from the adjoining bedroom--

"What's the matter?"

She did not answer, but went on,