ough
which he saw for miles. His lips twitched, and he seemed to compress his
frame, as if to bear better. His usual habit was not to consider whether
destiny were hard upon him or not--the shape of his ideals in cases of
affliction being simply a moody "I am to suffer, I perceive." "This
much scourging, then, it is for me." But now through his passionate head
there stormed this thought--that the blasting disclosure was what he had
deserved.

His wife's extreme reluctance to have the girl's name altered from
Newson to Henchard was now accounted for fully. It furnished another
illustration of that honesty in dishonesty which had characterized her
in other things.

He remained unnerved and purposeless for near a couple of hours; till he
suddenly said, "Ah--I wonder if it is true!"

He jumped up in an impulse, kicked off his slippers, and went with a
candle to the door of Elizabeth-Jane's room, where he put his ear to
the keyhole and listened. She was breathing profoundly. Henchard softly
turned the handle, entered, and shading the light, approached the
bedside. Gradually bringing the light from behind a screening curtain
he held it in such a manner that it fell slantwise on her face without
shining on her eyes. He steadfastly regarded her features.

They were fair: his were dark. But this was an unimportant preliminary.
In sleep there come to the surface buried genealogical facts, ancestral
curves, dead men's traits, which the mobility of daytime animation
screens and overwhelms. In the present statuesque repose of the young
girl's countenance Richard Newson's was unmistakably reflected. He could
not endure the sight of her, and hastened away.

Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it. His wife
was dead, and the first impulse for revenge died with the thought that
she was beyond him. He looked out at the night as at a fiend. Henchard,
like all his kind, was superstitious, and he could not help thinking
that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the
scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him. Yet they
had developed naturally. If he had not revealed his past history to
Elizabeth he would not have searched the drawer for papers, and so on.
The mockery was, that he should have no sooner taught a girl to claim
the shelter of his paternity than he discovered her to have no kinship
with him.

This ironical sequence of things angered him like an impish trick from
a fe