But she went on pleading in her distraction; and perhaps said things that would have been better left to silence.

“Angel!—­Angel!  I was a child—­a child when it happened!  I knew nothing of men.”

“You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit.”

“Then will you not forgive me?”

“I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all.”

“And love me?”

To this question he did not answer.

“O Angel—­my mother says that it sometimes happens so!—­she knows several cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not minded it much—­has got over it at least.  And yet the woman had not loved him as I do you!”

“Don’t, Tess; don’t argue.  Different societies, different manners.  You almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant woman, who have never been initiated into the proportions of social things.  You don’t know what you say.”

“I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!”

She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came.

“So much the worse for you.  I think that parson who unearthed your pedigree would have done better if he had held his tongue.  I cannot help associating your decline as a family with this other fact—­of your want of firmness.  Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit conduct.  Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more by informing me of your descent!  Here was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy!”

“Lots of families are as bad as mine in that!  Retty’s family were once large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett’s.  And the Debbyhouses, who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family.  You find such as I everywhere; ’tis a feature of our county, and I can’t help it.”

“So much the worse for the county.”

She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in their particulars; he did not love her as he had loved her hitherto, and to all else she was indifferent.

They wandered on again in silence.  It was said afterwards that a cottager of Wellbridge, who went out late that night for a doctor, met two lovers in the pastures, walking very slowly, without converse, one behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the glimpse that he obtained of their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and sad.  Returning later, he passed them again in the same field, progressing just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour and of the cheerless night as before.  It was only on account of his preoccupation with his own affairs, and the illness in his house, that he did not bear in mind the curious incident, which, however, he recalled a long while after.

During the interval of the cottager’s going and coming, she had said to her husband—­

“I don’t see how I can help being the cause of much misery to you all your life.  The river is down there.  I can put an end to myself in it.  I am not afraid.”