o fill the gap for
awhile, there being no pressure of half acquaintance to drive them into
speech if they were not minded for it.

"That's the way the wind blows, is it?" he said at last grimly, nodding
an affirmative to his own thoughts.

A yellow flood of reflected sunlight filled the room for a few instants.
It was produced by the passing of a load of newly trussed hay from the
country, in a waggon marked with Farfrae's name. Beside it rode Farfrae
himself on horseback. Lucetta's face became--as a woman's face becomes
when the man she loves rises upon her gaze like an apparition.

A turn of the eye by Henchard, a glance from the window, and the
secret of her inaccessibility would have been revealed. But Henchard in
estimating her tone was looking down so plumb-straight that he did not
note the warm consciousness upon Lucetta's face.

"I shouldn't have thought it--I shouldn't have thought it of women!" he
said emphatically by-and-by, rising and shaking himself into activity;
while Lucetta was so anxious to divert him from any suspicion of the
truth that she asked him to be in no hurry. Bringing him some apples she
insisted upon paring one for him.

He would not take it. "No, no; such is not for me," he said drily, and
moved to the door. At going out he turned his eye upon her.

"You came to live in Casterbridge entirely on my account," he said. "Yet
now you are here you won't have anything to say to my offer!"

He had hardly gone down the staircase when she dropped upon the sofa and
jumped up again in a fit of desperation. "I WILL love him!" she cried
passionately; "as for HIM--he's hot-tempered and stern, and it would be
madness to bind myself to him knowing that. I won't be a slave to the
past--I'll love where I choose!"

Yet having decided to break away from Henchard one might have supposed
her capable of aiming higher than Farfrae. But Lucetta reasoned nothing:
she feared hard words from the people with whom she had been earlier
associated; she had no relatives left; and with native lightness of
heart took kindly to what fate offered.

Elizabeth-Jane, surveying the position of Lucetta between her two lovers
from the crystalline sphere of a straightforward mind, did not fail to
perceive that her father, as she called him, and Donald Farfrae became
more desperately enamoured of her friend every day. On Farfrae's side
it was the unforced passion of youth. On Henchard's the artificially
stimulated coveting o