e;
and as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon,
although they were too remote for his sight--

"MARRY ME."

The pert injunction was like those crystal substances which,
colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about them. Here,
in the quiet of Boldwood's parlour, where everything that was not
grave was extraneous, and where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan
Sunday lasting all the week, the letter and its dictum changed their
tenor from the thoughtlessness of their origin to a deep solemnity,
imbibed from their accessories now.

Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood had felt
the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the
direction of an ideal passion. The disturbance was as the first
floating weed to Columbus--the contemptibly little suggesting
possibilities of the infinitely great.

The letter must have had an origin and a motive. That the latter
was of the smallest magnitude compatible with its existence at all,
Boldwood, of course, did not know. And such an explanation did not
strike him as a possibility even. It is foreign to a mystified
condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of
approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a
course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result. The
vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing
into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent
to the person confounded by the issue.

When Boldwood went to bed he placed the valentine in the corner of
the looking-glass. He was conscious of its presence, even when his
back was turned upon it. It was the first time in Boldwood's life
that such an event had occurred. The same fascination that caused
him to think it an act which had a deliberate motive prevented
him from regarding it as an impertinence. He looked again at
the direction. The mysterious influences of night invested the
writing with the presence of the unknown writer. Somebody's--some
WOMAN'S--hand had travelled softly over the paper bearing his name;
her unrevealed eyes had watched every curve as she formed it; her
brain had seen him in imagination the while. Why should she have
imagined him? Her mouth--were the lips red or pale, plump or
creased?--had curved itself to a certain expression as the pen went
on--the corners had moved with all their natural tremulousness: what
had been