“Oh, none—­we’ll no want much of that—­O no!” said Farfrae, shaking his head with appalled gravity.  “Do you leave all to me.”

When they had gone a little further in these particulars Newson, leaning back in his chair and smiling reflectively at the ceiling, said, “I’ve never told ye, or have I, Mr. Farfrae, how Henchard put me off the scent that time?”

He expressed ignorance of what the Captain alluded to.

“Ah, I thought I hadn’t.  I resolved that I would not, I remember, not to hurt the man’s name.  But now he’s gone I can tell ye.  Why, I came to Casterbridge nine or ten months before that day last week that I found ye out.  I had been here twice before then.  The first time I passed through the town on my way westward, not knowing Elizabeth lived here.  Then hearing at some place—­I forget where—­that a man of the name of Henchard had been mayor here, I came back, and called at his house one morning.  The old rascal!—­he said Elizabeth-Jane had died years ago.”

Elizabeth now gave earnest heed to his story.

“Now, it never crossed my mind that the man was selling me a packet,” continued Newson.  “And, if you’ll believe me, I was that upset, that I went back to the coach that had brought me, and took passage onward without lying in the town half-an-hour.  Ha-ha!—­’twas a good joke, and well carried out, and I give the man credit for’t!”

Elizabeth-Jane was amazed at the intelligence.  “A joke?—­O no!” she cried.  “Then he kept you from me, father, all those months, when you might have been here?”

The father admitted that such was the case.

“He ought not to have done it!” said Farfrae.

Elizabeth sighed.  “I said I would never forget him.  But O!  I think I ought to forget him now!”

Newson, like a good many rovers and sojourners among strange men and strange moralities, failed to perceive the enormity of Henchard’s crime, notwithstanding that he himself had been the chief sufferer therefrom.  Indeed, the attack upon the absent culprit waxing serious, he began to take Henchard’s part.

“Well, ’twas not ten words that he said, after all,” Newson pleaded.  “And how could he know that I should be such a simpleton as to believe him?  ’Twas as much my fault as his, poor fellow!”

“No,” said Elizabeth-Jane firmly, in her revulsion of feeling.  “He knew your disposition—­you always were so trusting, father; I’ve heard my mother say so hundreds of times—­and he did it to wrong you.  After weaning me from you these five years by saying he was my father, he should not have done this.”

Thus they conversed; and there was nobody to set before Elizabeth any extenuation of the absent one’s deceit.  Even had he been present Henchard might scarce have pleaded it, so little did he value himself or his good name.

“Well, well—­never mind—­it is all over and past,” said Newson good-naturedly.  “Now, about this wedding again.”