“I forgive ’ee, sir!” she said.

“Now, Izz,” he said, while she stood beside him there, forcing himself to the mentor’s part he was far from feeling; “I want you to tell Marian when you see her that she is to be a good woman, and not to give way to folly.  Promise that, and tell Retty that there are more worthy men than I in the world, that for my sake she is to act wisely and well—­remember the words—­wisely and well—­for my sake.  I send this message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I shall never see them again.  And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your honest words about my wife from an incredible impulse towards folly and treachery.  Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things!  On that one account I can never forget you.  Be always the good and sincere girl you have hitherto been; and think of me as a worthless lover, but a faithful friend.  Promise.”

She gave the promise.

“Heaven bless and keep you, sir.  Goodbye!”

He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane, and Clare was out of sight, than she flung herself down on the bank in a fit of racking anguish; and it was with a strained unnatural face that she entered her mother’s cottage late that night.  Nobody ever was told how Izz spent the dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare’s parting from her and her arrival home.

Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought to aching thoughts and quivering lips.  But his sorrow was not for Izz.  That evening he was within a feather-weight’s turn of abandoning his road to the nearest station, and driving across that elevated dorsal line of South Wessex which divided him from his Tess’s home.  It was neither a contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of her heart, which deterred him.

No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated by Izz’s admission, the facts had not changed.  If he was right at first, he was right now.  And the momentum of the course on which he had embarked tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by a stronger, more sustained force than had played upon him this afternoon.  He could soon come back to her.  He took the train that night for London, and five days after shook hands in farewell of his brothers at the port of embarkation.

XLI

From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to an October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting of Clare and Tess.  We discover the latter in changed conditions; instead of a bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see her a lonely woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage, as at an earlier time when she was no bride; instead of the ample means that were projected by her husband for her comfort through this probationary period, she can produce only a flattened purse.