home. Eustacia went upstairs, thinking that she would take a
walk at this her usual time; and she determined that her walk should be
in the direction of Blooms-End, the birthplace of young Yeobright and
the present home of his mother. She had no reason for walking elsewhere,
and why should she not go that way? The scene of the daydream is
sufficient for a pilgrimage at nineteen. To look at the palings before
the Yeobrights' house had the dignity of a necessary performance.
Strange that such a piece of idling should have seemed an important
errand.

She put on her bonnet, and, leaving the house, descended the hill on the
side towards Blooms-End, where she walked slowly along the valley for a
distance of a mile and a half. This brought her to a spot in which the
green bottom of the dale began to widen, the furze bushes to recede
yet further from the path on each side, till they were diminished to
an isolated one here and there by the increasing fertility of the soil.
Beyond the irregular carpet of grass was a row of white palings, which
marked the verge of the heath in this latitude. They showed upon the
dusky scene that they bordered as distinctly as white lace on velvet.
Behind the white palings was a little garden; behind the garden an old,
irregular, thatched house, facing the heath, and commanding a full view
of the valley. This was the obscure, removed spot to which was about
to return a man whose latter life had been passed in the French
capital--the centre and vortex of the fashionable world.

2--The People at Blooms-End Make Ready

All that afternoon the expected arrival of the subject of Eustacia's
ruminations created a bustle of preparation at Blooms-End. Thomasin had
been persuaded by her aunt, and by an instinctive impulse of loyalty
towards her cousin Clym, to bestir herself on his account with an
alacrity unusual in her during these most sorrowful days of her life. At
the time that Eustacia was listening to the rick-makers' conversation
on Clym's return, Thomasin was climbing into a loft over her aunt's
fuelhouse, where the store-apples were kept, to search out the best and
largest of them for the coming holiday-time.

The loft was lighted by a semicircular hole, through which the pigeons
crept to their lodgings in the same high quarters of the premises; and
from this hole the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure of
the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft b