ther Jude rushed at her heels.

IX

It was some two months later in the year, and the pair had met
constantly during the interval. Arabella seemed dissatisfied; she
was always imagining, and waiting, and wondering.

One day she met the itinerant Vilbert. She, like all the cottagers
thereabout, knew the quack well, and she began telling him of her
experiences. Arabella had been gloomy, but before he left her she
had grown brighter. That evening she kept an appointment with Jude,
who seemed sad.

"I am going away," he said to her. "I think I ought to go. I think
it will be better both for you and for me. I wish some things had
never begun! I was much to blame, I know. But it is never too late
to mend."

Arabella began to cry. "How do you know it is not too late?" she
said. "That's all very well to say! I haven't told you yet!" and
she looked into his face with streaming eyes.

"What?" he asked, turning pale. "Not...?"

"Yes! And what shall I do if you desert me?"

"Oh, Arabella--how can you say that, my dear! You KNOW I wouldn't
desert you!"

"Well then--"

"I have next to no wages as yet, you know; or perhaps I should have
thought of this before... But, of course if that's the case, we must
marry! What other thing do you think I could dream of doing?"

"I thought--I thought, deary, perhaps you would go away all the more
for that, and leave me to face it alone!"

"You knew better! Of course I never dreamt six months ago, or even
three, of marrying. It is a complete smashing up of my plans--I mean
my plans before I knew you, my dear. But what are they, after all!
Dreams about books, and degrees, and impossible fellowships, and all
that. Certainly we'll marry: we must!"

That night he went out alone, and walked in the dark self-communing.
He knew well, too well, in the secret centre of his brain, that
Arabella was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind.
Yet, such being the custom of the rural districts among honourable
young men who had drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he
unfortunately had done, he was ready to abide by what he had said,
and take the consequences. For his own soothing he kept up a
factitious belief in her. His idea of her was the thing of most
consequence, not Arabella herself, he sometimes said laconically.

The banns were put in and published the very next Sunday. The people
of the parish all said what a simple fool young Fawley was.