l
butchery!"

"Is it so, Mother?" asked the boy intently.

"Yes!" said Sue vehemently.

"Well, they must take their chance, now, poor things," said Jude.
"As soon as the sale-account is wound up, and our bills paid, we go."

"Where do we go to?" asked Time, in suspense.

"We must sail under sealed orders, that nobody may trace us... We
mustn't go to Alfredston, or to Melchester, or to Shaston, or to
Christminster. Apart from those we may go anywhere."

"Why mustn't we go there, Father?"

"Because of a cloud that has gathered over us; though 'we have
wronged no man, corrupted no man, defrauded no man!' Though perhaps
we have 'done that which was right in our own eyes.'"

VII

From that week Jude Fawley and Sue walked no more in the town of
Aldbrickham.

Whither they had gone nobody knew, chiefly because nobody cared
to know. Any one sufficiently curious to trace the steps of such
an obscure pair might have discovered without great trouble that
they had taken advantage of his adaptive craftsmanship to enter
on a shifting, almost nomadic, life, which was not without its
pleasantness for a time.

Wherever Jude heard of free-stone work to be done, thither he went,
choosing by preference places remote from his old haunts and Sue's.
He laboured at a job, long or briefly, till it was finished; and
then moved on.

Two whole years and a half passed thus. Sometimes he might have
been found shaping the mullions of a country mansion, sometimes
setting the parapet of a town-hall, sometimes ashlaring an hotel at
Sandbourne, sometimes a museum at Casterbridge, sometimes as far down
as Exonbury, sometimes at Stoke-Barehills. Later still he was at
Kennetbridge, a thriving town not more than a dozen miles south of
Marygreen, this being his nearest approach to the village where he
was known; for he had a sensitive dread of being questioned as to his
life and fortunes by those who had been acquainted with him during
his ardent young manhood of study and promise, and his brief and
unhappy married life at that time.

At some of these places he would be detained for months, at others
only a few weeks. His curious and sudden antipathy to ecclesiastical
work, both episcopal and noncomformist, which had risen in him when
suffering under a smarting sense of misconception, remained with him
in cold blood, less from any fear of renewed censure than from an
ultra-conscientiousness which would not allow him to seek a li