Half-past ten in the morning was about her hour for seeking this spot—­a time when the town avenues were deserted as the avenues of Karnac.  Business had long since passed down them into its daily cells, and Leisure had not arrived there.  So Elizabeth-Jane walked and read, or looked over the edge of the book to think, and thus reached the churchyard.

There, approaching her mother’s grave she saw a solitary dark figure in the middle of the gravel-walk.  This figure, too, was reading; but not from a book:  the words which engrossed it being the inscription on Mrs. Henchard’s tombstone.  The personage was in mourning like herself, was about her age and size, and might have been her wraith or double, but for the fact that it was a lady much more beautifully dressed than she.  Indeed, comparatively indifferent as Elizabeth-Jane was to dress, unless for some temporary whim or purpose, her eyes were arrested by the artistic perfection of the lady’s appearance.  Her gait, too, had a flexuousness about it, which seemed to avoid angularity.  It was a revelation to Elizabeth that human beings could reach this stage of external development—­she had never suspected it.  She felt all the freshness and grace to be stolen from herself on the instant by the neighbourhood of such a stranger.  And this was in face of the fact that Elizabeth could now have been writ handsome, while the young lady was simply pretty.

Had she been envious she might have hated the woman; but she did not do that—­she allowed herself the pleasure of feeling fascinated.  She wondered where the lady had come from.  The stumpy and practical walk of honest homeliness which mostly prevailed there, the two styles of dress thereabout, the simple and the mistaken, equally avouched that this figure was no Casterbridge woman’s, even if a book in her hand resembling a guide-book had not also suggested it.

The stranger presently moved from the tombstone of Mrs. Henchard, and vanished behind the corner of the wall.  Elizabeth went to the tomb herself; beside it were two footprints distinct in the soil, signifying that the lady had stood there a long time.  She returned homeward, musing on what she had seen, as she might have mused on a rainbow or the Northern Lights, a rare butterfly or a cameo.

Interesting as things had been out of doors, at home it turned out to be one of her bad days.  Henchard, whose two years’ mayoralty was ending, had been made aware that he was not to be chosen to fill a vacancy in the list of aldermen; and that Farfrae was likely to become one of the Council.  This caused the unfortunate discovery that she had played the waiting-maid in the town of which he was Mayor to rankle in his mind yet more poisonously.  He had learnt by personal inquiry at the time that it was to Donald Farfrae—­that treacherous upstart—­that she had thus humiliated herself.  And though Mrs. Stannidge seemed to attach no great importance to the incident—­the cheerful souls at the Three Mariners having exhausted its aspects long ago—­such was Henchard’s haughty spirit that the simple thrifty deed was regarded as little less than a social catastrophe by him.