“I don’t understand.”

“He has won me back to him.”

Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands, which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate.

She continued—­

“He is upstairs.  I hate him now, because he told me a lie—­that you would not come again; and you HAVE come!  These clothes are what he’s put upon me:  I didn’t care what he did wi’ me!  But—­will you go away, Angel, please, and never come any more?”

They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see.  Both seemed to implore something to shelter them from reality.

“Ah—­it is my fault!” said Clare.

But he could not get on.  Speech was as inexpressive as silence.  But he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers—­allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will.

A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone.  His face grew colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment, and a minute or two after, he found himself in the street, walking along he did not know whither.

LVI

Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The Herons and owner of all the handsome furniture, was not a person of an unusually curious turn of mind.  She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own sake, and apart from possible lodgers’ pockets.  Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d’Urberville, as she deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of time and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity which had been stifled down as useless save in its bearings to the letting trade.

Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without entering the dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who stood within the partly-closed door of her own sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear fragments of the conversation—­if conversation it could be called—­between those two wretched souls.  She heard Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first floor, and the departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door behind him.  Then the door of the room above was shut, and Mrs Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her apartment.  As the young lady was not fully dressed, Mrs Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for some time.

She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood at the door of the front room—­a drawing-room, connected with the room immediately behind it (which was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner.  This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks’s best apartments, had been taken by the week by the d’Urbervilles.  The back room was now in silence; but from the drawing-room there came sounds.