the door, and Elizabeth-Jane saw
with some interest the note brought into the dining-room and handed to
the Mayor.

Henchard looked at it carelessly, unfolded it with one hand, and glanced
it through. Thereupon it was curious to note an unexpected effect. The
nettled, clouded aspect which had held possession of his face since the
subject of his corn-dealings had been broached, changed itself into one
of arrested attention. He read the note slowly, and fell into thought,
not moody, but fitfully intense, as that of a man who has been captured
by an idea.

By this time toasts and speeches had given place to songs, the wheat
subject being quite forgotten. Men were putting their heads together in
twos and threes, telling good stories, with pantomimic laughter which
reached convulsive grimace. Some were beginning to look as if they did
not know how they had come there, what they had come for, or how they
were going to get home again; and provisionally sat on with a dazed
smile. Square-built men showed a tendency to become hunchbacks; men with
a dignified presence lost it in a curious obliquity of figure, in which
their features grew disarranged and one-sided, whilst the heads of a few
who had dined with extreme thoroughness were somehow sinking into their
shoulders, the corners of their mouth and eyes being bent upwards by the
subsidence. Only Henchard did not conform to these flexuous changes; he
remained stately and vertical, silently thinking.

The clock struck nine. Elizabeth-Jane turned to her companion. "The
evening is drawing on, mother," she said. "What do you propose to do?"

She was surprised to find how irresolute her mother had become. "We must
get a place to lie down in," she murmured. "I have seen--Mr. Henchard;
and that's all I wanted to do."

"That's enough for to-night, at any rate," Elizabeth-Jane replied
soothingly. "We can think to-morrow what is best to do about him. The
question now is--is it not?--how shall we find a lodging?"

As her mother did not reply Elizabeth-Jane's mind reverted to the words
of the waiter, that the Three Mariners was an inn of moderate charges. A
recommendation good for one person was probably good for another. "Let's
go where the young man has gone to," she said. "He is respectable. What
do you say?"

Her mother assented, and down the street they went.

In the meantime the Mayor's thoughtfulness, engendered by the note as
stated, continued to hold him in abstraction; ti