“You answer me; you think only of her.  You stick to her in all things.”

“That proves her to be worthy.  I have never yet supported what is bad.  And I do not care only for her.  I care for you and for myself, and for anything that is good.  When a woman once dislikes another she is merciless!”

“O Clym! please don’t go setting down as my fault what is your obstinate wrong-headedness.  If you wished to connect yourself with an unworthy person why did you come home here to do it?  Why didn’t you do it in Paris?—­it is more the fashion there.  You have come only to distress me, a lonely woman, and shorten my days!  I wish that you would bestow your presence where you bestow your love!”

Clym said huskily, “You are my mother.  I will say no more—­beyond this, that I beg your pardon for having thought this my home.  I will no longer inflict myself upon you; I’ll go.”  And he went out with tears in his eyes.

It was a sunny afternoon at the beginning of summer, and the moist hollows of the heath had passed from their brown to their green stage.  Yeobright walked to the edge of the basin which extended down from Mistover and Rainbarrow.  By this time he was calm, and he looked over the landscape.  In the minor valleys, between the hillocks which diversified the contour of the vale, the fresh young ferns were luxuriantly growing up, ultimately to reach a height of five or six feet.  He descended a little way, flung himself down in a spot where a path emerged from one of the small hollows, and waited.  Hither it was that he had promised Eustacia to bring his mother this afternoon, that they might meet and be friends.  His attempt had utterly failed.

He was in a nest of vivid green.  The ferny vegetation round him, though so abundant, was quite uniform:  it was a grove of machine-made foliage, a world of green triangles with saw-edges, and not a single flower.  The air was warm with a vaporous warmth, and the stillness was unbroken.  Lizards, grasshoppers, and ants were the only living things to be beheld.  The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period, when the forms of plants were few, and of the fern kind; when there was neither bud nor blossom, nothing but a monotonous extent of leafage, amid which no bird sang.

When he had reclined for some considerable time, gloomily pondering, he discerned above the ferns a drawn bonnet of white silk approaching from the left, and Yeobright knew directly that it covered the head of her he loved.  His heart awoke from its apathy to a warm excitement, and, jumping to his feet, he said aloud, “I knew she was sure to come.”

She vanished in a hollow for a few moments, and then her whole form unfolded itself from the brake.

“Only you here?” she exclaimed, with a disappointed air, whose hollowness was proved by her rising redness and her half-guilty low laugh.  “Where is Mrs. Yeobright?”

“She has not come,” he replied in a subdued tone.