n to her. But, as you did see
her, you should have said: 'How d'ye do, my dear-that-was?'"

"Ah, well. I might have. But what do you think of this: I have good
reason for supposing that she was innocent when I divorced her--that
I was all wrong. Yes, indeed! Awkward, isn't it?"

"She has taken care to set you right since, anyhow, apparently."

"H'm. That's a cheap sneer. I ought to have waited, unquestionably."

At the end of the week, when Gillingham had gone back to his school
near Shaston, Phillotson, as was his custom, went to Alfredston
market; ruminating again on Arabella's intelligence as he walked down
the long hill which he had known before Jude knew it, though his
history had not beaten so intensely upon its incline. Arrived in
the town he bought his usual weekly local paper; and when he had sat
down in an inn to refresh himself for the five miles' walk back, he
pulled the paper from his pocket and read awhile. The account of the
"strange suicide of a stone-mason's children" met his eye.

Unimpassioned as he was, it impressed him painfully, and puzzled him
not a little, for he could not understand the age of the elder child
being what it was stated to be. However, there was no doubt that the
newspaper report was in some way true.

"Their cup of sorrow is now full!" he said: and thought and thought
of Sue, and what she had gained by leaving him.

Arabella having made her home at Alfredston, and the schoolmaster
coming to market there every Saturday, it was not wonderful that in
a few weeks they met again--the precise time being just alter her
return from Christminster, where she had stayed much longer than she
had at first intended, keeping an interested eye on Jude, though Jude
had seen no more of her. Phillotson was on his way homeward when he
encountered Arabella, and she was approaching the town.

"You like walking out this way, Mrs. Cartlett?" he said.

"I've just begun to again," she replied. "It is where I lived
as maid and wife, and all the past things of my life that are
interesting to my feelings are mixed up with this road. And they
have been stirred up in me too, lately; for I've been visiting at
Christminster. Yes; I've seen Jude."

"Ah! How do they bear their terrible affliction?"

"In a ve-ry strange way--ve-ry strange! She don't live with him any
longer. I only heard of it as a certainty just before I left; though
I had thought things were drifting that way from their