“Tess is queer.”

“But she’s tractable at bottom.  Leave her to me.”

Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that the Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in store.

“Tess is a fine figure o’ fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed her vamping round parish with the rest,” observed one of the elderly boozers in an undertone.  “But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t get green malt in floor.”  It was a local phrase which had a peculiar meaning, and there was no reply.

The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were heard crossing the room below.

“—­Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking at my own expense.”  The landlady had rapidly re-used the formula she kept on hand for intruders before she recognized that the newcomer was Tess.

Even to her mother’s gaze the girl’s young features looked sadly out of place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from Tess’s dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs Rolliver’s caution following their footsteps.

“No noise, please, if ye’ll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my licends, and be summons’d, and I don’t know what all!  ’Night t’ye!”

They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs Durbeyfield the other.  He had, in truth, drunk very little—­not a fourth of the quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or genuflections; but the weakness of Sir John’s constitution made mountains of his petty sins in this kind.  On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to Bath—­which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so comic after all.  The two women valiantly disguised these forced excursions and countermarches as well as they could from Durbeyfield, their cause, and from Abraham, and from themselves; and so they approached by degrees their own door, the head of the family bursting suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if to fortify his soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence—­

“I’ve got a fam—­ily vault at Kingsbere!”

“Hush—­don’t be so silly, Jacky,” said his wife.  “Yours is not the only family that was of ’count in wold days.  Look at the Anktells, and Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves—­gone to seed a’most as much as you—­though you was bigger folks than they, that’s true.  Thank God, I was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!”