ose story was well known. She followed the
corpse as the only mourner, Clark having been without relations in this
part of the country, and a communication with his regiment having brought
none from a distance. She sat in a little shabby brown-black mourning
carriage, squeezing herself up in a corner to be as much as possible out
of sight during the slow and dramatic march through the town to the tune
from Saul. When the interment had taken place, the volleys been fired,
and the return journey begun, it was with something like a shock that she
found the military escort to be moving at a quick march to the lively
strains of 'Off she goes!' as if all care for the sergeant-major was
expected to be ended with the late discharge of the carbines. It was, by
chance, the very tune to which they had been footing when he died, and
unable to bear its notes, she hastily told her driver to drop behind. The
band and military party diminished up the High Street, and Selina turned
over Swan bridge and homeward to Mellstock.

Then recommenced for her a life whose incidents were precisely of a suit
with those which had preceded the soldier's return; but how different in
her appreciation of them! Her narrow miss of the recovered
respectability they had hoped for from that tardy event worked upon her
parents as an irritant, and after the first week or two of her mourning
her life with them grew almost insupportable. She had impulsively taken
to herself the weeds of a widow, for such she seemed to herself to be,
and clothed little Johnny in sables likewise. This assumption of a moral
relationship to the deceased, which she asserted to be only not a legal
one by two most unexpected accidents, led the old people to indulge in
sarcasm at her expense whenever they beheld her attire, though all the
while it cost them more pain to utter than it gave her to hear it. Having
become accustomed by her residence at home to the business carried on by
her father, she surprised them one day by going off with the child to
Chalk-Newton, in the direction of the town of Ivell, and opening a
miniature fruit and vegetable shop, attending Ivell market with her
produce. Her business grew somewhat larger, and it was soon sufficient
to enable her to support herself and the boy in comfort. She called
herself 'Mrs. John Clark' from the day of leaving home, and painted the
name on her signboard--no man forbidding her.

By degrees the pain of her state was f