im."

"Dear me--is that so!" said Farfrae.

As for Elizabeth, she said nothing.

"Upon the head of his bed he pinned a piece of paper, with some writing
upon it," continued Abel Whittle. "But not being a man o' letters, I
can't read writing; so I don't know what it is. I can get it and show
ye."

They stood in silence while he ran into the cottage; returning in a
moment with a crumpled scrap of paper. On it there was pencilled as
follows:--

MICHAEL HENCHARD'S WILL

"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve
on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name.

"MICHAEL HENCHARD"

"What are we to do?" said Donald, when he had handed the paper to her.

She could not answer distinctly. "O Donald!" she cried at last through
her tears, "what bitterness lies there! O I would not have minded so
much if it had not been for my unkindness at that last parting!... But
there's no altering--so it must be."

What Henchard had written in the anguish of his dying was respected as
far as practicable by Elizabeth-Jane, though less from a sense of the
sacredness of last words, as such, than from her independent knowledge
that the man who wrote them meant what he said. She knew the directions
to be a piece of the same stuff that his whole life was made of, and
hence were not to be tampered with to give herself a mournful pleasure,
or her husband credit for large-heartedness.

All was over at last, even her regrets for having misunderstood him on
his last visit, for not having searched him out sooner, though
these were deep and sharp for a good while. From this time forward
Elizabeth-Jane found herself in a latitude of calm weather, kindly and
grateful in itself, and doubly so after the Capharnaum in which some of
her preceding years had been spent. As the lively and sparkling emotions
of her early married live cohered into an equable serenity, the finer
movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived
ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited
opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning
enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute
forms of satisfacti