e do you think I
shall last before I get hopelessly plain?"

There was something curious in the way in which Elizabeth, though
the younger, had come to play the part of experienced sage in these
discussions. "It may be five years," she said judicially. "Or, with a
quiet life, as many as ten. With no love you might calculate on ten."

Lucetta seemed to reflect on this as on an unalterable, impartial
verdict. She told Elizabeth-Jane no more of the past attachment she had
roughly adumbrated as the experiences of a third person; and Elizabeth,
who in spite of her philosophy was very tender-hearted, sighed that
night in bed at the thought that her pretty, rich Lucetta did not treat
her to the full confidence of names and dates in her confessions. For by
the "she" of Lucetta's story Elizabeth had not been beguiled.

25.

The next phase of the supersession of Henchard in Lucetta's heart was
an experiment in calling on her performed by Farfrae with some apparent
trepidation. Conventionally speaking he conversed with both Miss
Templeman and her companion; but in fact it was rather that Elizabeth
sat invisible in the room. Donald appeared not to see her at all, and
answered her wise little remarks with curtly indifferent monosyllables,
his looks and faculties hanging on the woman who could boast of a more
Protean variety in her phases, moods, opinions, and also principles,
than could Elizabeth. Lucetta had persisted in dragging her into the
circle; but she had remained like an awkward third point which that
circle would not touch.

Susan Henchard's daughter bore up against the frosty ache of the
treatment, as she had borne up under worse things, and contrived as soon
as possible to get out of the inharmonious room without being missed.
The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her and
walked with her in a delicate poise between love and friendship--that
period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be
unalloyed with pain.

She stoically looked from her bedroom window, and contemplated her fate
as if it were written on the top of the church-tower hard by. "Yes," she
said at last, bringing down her palm upon the sill with a pat: "HE is
the second man of that story she told me!"

All this time Henchard's smouldering sentiments towards Lucetta had been
fanned into higher and higher inflammation by the circumstances of the
case. He was discovering that the young woman for whom he o