His room overlooked the front of the premises and the valley of the heath beyond.  The lowest beams of the winter sun threw the shadow of the house over the palings, across the grass margin of the heath, and far up the vale, where the chimney outlines and those of the surrounding treetops stretched forth in long dark prongs.  Having been seated at work all day, he decided to take a turn upon the hills before it got dark; and, going out forthwith, he struck across the heath towards Mistover.

It was an hour and a half later when he again appeared at the garden gate.  The shutters of the house were closed, and Christian Cantle, who had been wheeling manure about the garden all day, had gone home.  On entering he found that his mother, after waiting a long time for him, had finished her meal.

“Where have you been, Clym?” she immediately said.  “Why didn’t you tell me that you were going away at this time?”

“I have been on the heath.”

“You’ll meet Eustacia Vye if you go up there.”

Clym paused a minute.  “Yes, I met her this evening,” he said, as though it were spoken under the sheer necessity of preserving honesty.

“I wondered if you had.”

“It was no appointment.”

“No; such meetings never are.”

“But you are not angry, mother?”

“I can hardly say that I am not.  Angry?  No.  But when I consider the usual nature of the drag which causes men of promise to disappoint the world I feel uneasy.”

“You deserve credit for the feeling, mother.  But I can assure you that you need not be disturbed by it on my account.”

“When I think of you and your new crotchets,” said Mrs. Yeobright, with some emphasis, “I naturally don’t feel so comfortable as I did a twelvemonth ago.  It is incredible to me that a man accustomed to the attractive women of Paris and elsewhere should be so easily worked upon by a girl in a heath.  You could just as well have walked another way.”

“I had been studying all day.”

“Well, yes,” she added more hopefully, “I have been thinking that you might get on as a schoolmaster, and rise that way, since you really are determined to hate the course you were pursuing.”

Yeobright was unwilling to disturb this idea, though his scheme was far enough removed from one wherein the education of youth should be made a mere channel of social ascent.  He had no desires of that sort.  He had reached the stage in a young man’s life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile.  In France it is not uncustomary to commit suicide at this stage; in England we do much better, or much worse, as the case may be.

The love between the young man and his mother was strangely invisible now.  Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative.  In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.  It was so with these.  Had conversations between them been overheard, people would have said, “How cold they are to each other!”