el' as if you knew him well? And how is it
he has got this power over you, that you promise to marry him against
your will? Ah--you have many many secrets from me!"

"Perhaps you have some from me," Lucetta murmured with closed eyes,
little thinking, however, so unsuspicious was she, that the secret of
Elizabeth's heart concerned the young man who had caused this damage to
her own.

"I would not--do anything against you at all!" stammered Elizabeth,
keeping in all signs of emotion till she was ready to burst. "I cannot
understand how my father can command you so; I don't sympathize with him
in it at all. I'll go to him and ask him to release you."

"No, no," said Lucetta. "Let it all be."

28.

The next morning Henchard went to the Town Hall below Lucetta's house,
to attend Petty Sessions, being still a magistrate for the year by
virtue of his late position as Mayor. In passing he looked up at her
windows, but nothing of her was to be seen.

Henchard as a Justice of the Peace may at first seem to be an even
greater incongruity than Shallow and Silence themselves. But his rough
and ready perceptions, his sledge-hammer directness, had often served
him better than nice legal knowledge in despatching such simple business
as fell to his hands in this Court. To-day Dr. Chalkfield, the Mayor for
the year, being absent, the corn-merchant took the big chair, his eyes
still abstractedly stretching out of the window to the ashlar front of
High-Place Hall.

There was one case only, and the offender stood before him. She was an
old woman of mottled countenance, attired in a shawl of that nameless
tertiary hue which comes, but cannot be made--a hue neither tawny,
russet, hazel, nor ash; a sticky black bonnet that seemed to have been
worn in the country of the Psalmist where the clouds drop fatness; and
an apron that had been white in time so comparatively recent as still to
contrast visibly with the rest of her clothes. The steeped aspect of the
woman as a whole showed her to be no native of the country-side or even
of a country-town.

She looked cursorily at Henchard and the second magistrate, and Henchard
looked at her, with a momentary pause, as if she had reminded him
indistinctly of somebody or something which passed from his mind as
quickly as it had come. "Well, and what has she been doing?" he said,
looking down at the charge sheet.

"She is charged, sir, with the offence of disorderly female and
nuisance,