“You probably are aware of my arrangement with your daughter, and have doubtless laughed at the—­what shall I call it?—­practical joke (in all affection) of my getting her to live with me.  But my first meeting with her was purely an accident.  Do you see, Michael, partly why I have done it?—­why, to give you an excuse for coming here as if to visit her, and thus to form my acquaintance naturally.  She is a dear, good girl, and she thinks you have treated her with undue severity.  You may have done so in your haste, but not deliberately, I am sure.  As the result has been to bring her to me I am not disposed to upbraid you.—­In haste, yours always,

“Lucetta.”

The excitement which these announcements produced in Henchard’s gloomy soul was to him most pleasurable.  He sat over his dining-table long and dreamily, and by an almost mechanical transfer the sentiments which had run to waste since his estrangement from Elizabeth-Jane and Donald Farfrae gathered around Lucetta before they had grown dry.  She was plainly in a very coming-on disposition for marriage.  But what else could a poor woman be who had given her time and her heart to him so thoughtlessly, at that former time, as to lose her credit by it?  Probably conscience no less than affection had brought her here.  On the whole he did not blame her.

“The artful little woman!” he said, smiling (with reference to Lucetta’s adroit and pleasant manoeuvre with Elizabeth-Jane).

To feel that he would like to see Lucetta was with Henchard to start for her house.  He put on his hat and went.  It was between eight and nine o’clock when he reached her door.  The answer brought him was that Miss Templeman was engaged for that evening; but that she would be happy to see him the next day.

“That’s rather like giving herself airs!” he thought.  “And considering what we—­” But after all, she plainly had not expected him, and he took the refusal quietly.  Nevertheless he resolved not to go next day.  “These cursed women—­there’s not an inch of straight grain in ’em!” he said.

Let us follow the train of Mr. Henchard’s thought as if it were a clue line, and view the interior of High-Place Hall on this particular evening.

On Elizabeth-Jane’s arrival she had been phlegmatically asked by an elderly woman to go upstairs and take off her things.  She replied with great earnestness that she would not think of giving that trouble, and on the instant divested herself of her bonnet and cloak in the passage.  She was then conducted to the first floor on the landing, and left to find her way further alone.

The room disclosed was prettily furnished as a boudoir or small drawing-room, and on a sofa with two cylindrical pillows reclined a dark-haired, large-eyed, pretty woman, of unmistakably French extraction on one side or the other.  She was probably some years older than Elizabeth, and had a sparkling light in her eye.  In front of the sofa was a small table, with a pack of cards scattered upon it faces upward.