onscience. She saw him no more.

Of Henchard they heard nothing. To the liege subjects of Labour, the
England of those days was a continent, and a mile a geographical degree.

Elizabeth-Jane developed early into womanliness. One day a month or
so after receiving intelligence of Newson's death off the Bank of
Newfoundland, when the girl was about eighteen, she was sitting on a
willow chair in the cottage they still occupied, working twine nets for
the fishermen. Her mother was in a back corner of the same room engaged
in the same labour, and dropping the heavy wood needle she was filling
she surveyed her daughter thoughtfully. The sun shone in at the door
upon the young woman's head and hair, which was worn loose, so that the
rays streamed into its depths as into a hazel copse. Her face, though
somewhat wan and incomplete, possessed the raw materials of beauty in a
promising degree. There was an under-handsomeness in it, struggling
to reveal itself through the provisional curves of immaturity, and the
casual disfigurements that resulted from the straitened circumstances of
their lives. She was handsome in the bone, hardly as yet handsome in the
flesh. She possibly might never be fully handsome, unless the carking
accidents of her daily existence could be evaded before the mobile parts
of her countenance had settled to their final mould.

The sight of the girl made her mother sad--not vaguely but by logical
inference. They both were still in that strait-waistcoat of poverty from
which she had tried so many times to be delivered for the girl's sake.
The woman had long perceived how zealously and constantly the young mind
of her companion was struggling for enlargement; and yet now, in
her eighteenth year, it still remained but little unfolded. The
desire--sober and repressed--of Elizabeth-Jane's heart was indeed to
see, to hear, and to understand. How could she become a woman of wider
knowledge, higher repute--"better," as she termed it--this was her
constant inquiry of her mother. She sought further into things than
other girls in her position ever did, and her mother groaned as she felt
she could not aid in the search.

The sailor, drowned or no, was probably now lost to them; and Susan's
staunch, religious adherence to him as her husband in principle, till
her views had been disturbed by enlightenment, was demanded no more. She
asked herself whether the present moment, now that she was a free woman
again, were not as