“Sit down, sit down,” he said gently.  “You are ill; and it is natural that you should be.”

She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep.

“I don’t belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?” she asked helplessly.  “It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he says.”

The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was ill-used.  Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she turned round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.

Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the woe of the disclosure itself.  He waited patiently, apathetically, till the violence of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of weeping had lessened to a catching gasp at intervals.

“Angel,” she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice of terror having left her now.  “Angel, am I too wicked for you and me to live together?”

“I have not been able to think what we can do.”

“I shan’t ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because I have no right to!  I shall not write to mother and sisters to say we be married, as I said I would do; and I shan’t finish the good-hussif’ I cut out and meant to make while we were in lodgings.”

“Shan’t you?”

“No, I shan’t do anything, unless you order me to; and if you go away from me I shall not follow ’ee; and if you never speak to me any more I shall not ask why, unless you tell me I may.”

“And if I order you to do anything?”

“I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it is to lie down and die.”

“You are very good.  But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of self-preservation.”

These were the first words of antagonism.  To fling elaborate sarcasms at Tess, however, was much like flinging them at a dog or cat.  The charms of their subtlety passed by her unappreciated, and she only received them as inimical sounds which meant that anger ruled.  She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for her.  She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.  Meanwhile reillumination as to the terrible and total change that her confession had wrought in his life, in his universe, returned to him, and he tried desperately to advance among the new conditions in which he stood.  Some consequent action was necessary; yet what?

“Tess,” he said, as gently as he could speak, “I cannot stay—­in this room—­just now.  I will walk out a little way.”

He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had poured out for their supper—­one for her, one for him—­remained on the table untasted.  This was what their agape had come to.  At tea, two or three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of affection, drunk from one cup.