too laughed, but there was a strong flavour of bitterness in
his amusement.

Challow made up for his neglect of the killing by zeal in the
scalding and scraping. Jude felt dissatisfied with himself as a man
at what he had done, though aware of his lack of common sense, and
that the deed would have amounted to the same thing if carried out by
deputy. The white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal,
wore an illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a
Christian; but he could not see how the matter was to be mended. No
doubt he was, as his wife had called him, a tender-hearted fool.

He did not like the road to Alfredston now. It stared him cynically
in the face. The wayside objects reminded him so much of his
courtship of his wife that, to keep them out of his eyes, he
read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work. Yet
he sometimes felt that by caring for books he was not escaping
common-place nor gaining rare ideas, every working-man being of that
taste now. When passing near the spot by the stream on which he had
first made her acquaintance he one day heard voices just as he had
done at that earlier time. One of the girls who had been Arabella's
companions was talking to a friend in a shed, himself being the
subject of discourse, possibly because they had seen him in the
distance. They were quite unaware that the shed-walls were so thin
that he could hear their words as he passed.

"Howsomever, 'twas I put her up to it! 'Nothing venture nothing
have,' I said. If I hadn't she'd no more have been his mis'ess than
I."

"'Tis my belief she knew there was nothing the matter when she told
him she was..."

What had Arabella been put up to by this woman, so that he should
make her his "mis'ess," otherwise wife? The suggestion was horridly
unpleasant, and it rankled in his mind so much that instead of
entering his own cottage when he reached it he flung his basket
inside the garden-gate and passed on, determined to go and see his
old aunt and get some supper there.

This made his arrival home rather late. Arabella however, was busy
melting down lard from fat of the deceased pig, for she had been out
on a jaunt all day, and so delayed her work. Dreading lest what he
had heard should lead him to say something regrettable to her he
spoke little. But Arabella was very talkative, and said among other
things that she wanted some money. Seeing the book sticking out of
his poc