le. "You don't
forget, of course," he resumed, "that curious chapter in the history of
my past which I told you of, and that you gave me some assistance in?
These letters are, in fact, related to that unhappy business. Though,
thank God, it is all over now."

"What became of the poor woman?" asked Farfrae.

"Luckily she married, and married well," said Henchard. "So that these
reproaches she poured out on me do not now cause me any twinges, as they
might otherwise have done....Just listen to what an angry woman will
say!"

Farfrae, willing to humour Henchard, though quite uninterested, and
bursting with yawns, gave well-mannered attention.

"'For me,'" Henchard read, "'there is practically no future. A creature
too unconventionally devoted to you--who feels it impossible that she
can be the wife of any other man; and who is yet no more to you than the
first woman you meet in the street--such am I. I quite acquit you of any
intention to wrong me, yet you are the door through which wrong has come
to me. That in the event of your present wife's death you will place me
in her position is a consolation so far as it goes--but how far does it
go? Thus I sit here, forsaken by my few acquaintance, and forsaken by
you!'"

"That's how she went on to me," said Henchard, "acres of words like
that, when what had happened was what I could not cure."

"Yes," said Farfrae absently, "it is the way wi' women." But the
fact was that he knew very little of the sex; yet detecting a sort of
resemblance in style between the effusions of the woman he worshipped
and those of the supposed stranger, he concluded that Aphrodite ever
spoke thus, whosesoever the personality she assumed.

Henchard unfolded another letter, and read it through likewise, stopping
at the subscription as before. "Her name I don't give," he said blandly.
"As I didn't marry her, and another man did, I can scarcely do that in
fairness to her."

"Tr-rue, tr-rue," said Farfrae. "But why didn't you marry her when your
wife Susan died?" Farfrae asked this and the other questions in the
comfortably indifferent tone of one whom the matter very remotely
concerned.

"Ah--well you may ask that!" said Henchard, the new-moon-shaped
grin adumbrating itself again upon his mouth. "In spite of all her
protestations, when I came forward to do so, as in generosity bound, she
was not the woman for me."

"She had already married another--maybe?"

Henchard seemed to think it would