The only living thing that entered now was a sparrow; and seeing no movements to cause alarm, he hopped boldly round the room, endeavoured to go out by the window, and fluttered among the pot-flowers.  This roused the lonely sitter, who got up, released the bird, and went to the door.  She was expecting Thomasin, who had written the night before to state that the time had come when she would wish to have the money, and that she would if possible call this day.

Yet Thomasin occupied Mrs. Yeobright’s thoughts but slightly as she looked up the valley of the heath, alive with butterflies, and with grasshoppers whose husky noises on every side formed a whispered chorus.  A domestic drama, for which the preparations were now being made a mile or two off, was but little less vividly present to her eyes than if enacted before her.  She tried to dismiss the vision, and walked about the garden plot; but her eyes ever and anon sought out the direction of the parish church to which Mistover belonged, and her excited fancy clove the hills which divided the building from her eyes.  The morning wore away.  Eleven o’clock struck:  could it be that the wedding was then in progress?  It must be so.  She went on imagining the scene at the church, which he had by this time approached with his bride.  She pictured the little group of children by the gate as the pony-carriage drove up in which, as Thomasin had learnt, they were going to perform the short journey.  Then she saw them enter and proceed to the chancel and kneel; and the service seemed to go on.

She covered her face with her hands.  “O, it is a mistake!” she groaned.  “And he will rue it some day, and think of me!”

While she remained thus, overcome by her forebodings, the old clock indoors whizzed forth twelve strokes.  Soon after, faint sounds floated to her ear from afar over the hills.  The breeze came from that quarter, and it had brought with it the notes of distant bells, gaily starting off in a peal:  one, two, three, four, five.  The ringers at East Egdon were announcing the nuptials of Eustacia and her son.

“Then it is over,” she murmured.  “Well, well! and life too will be over soon.  And why should I go on scalding my face like this?  Cry about one thing in life, cry about all; one thread runs through the whole piece.  And yet we say, ‘a time to laugh!’”

Towards evening Wildeve came.  Since Thomasin’s marriage Mrs. Yeobright had shown towards him that grim friendliness which at last arises in all such cases of undesired affinity.  The vision of what ought to have been is thrown aside in sheer weariness, and browbeaten human endeavour listlessly makes the best of the fact that is.  Wildeve, to do him justice, had behaved very courteously to his wife’s aunt; and it was with no surprise that she saw him enter now.

“Thomasin has not been able to come, as she promised to do,” he replied to her inquiry, which had been anxious, for she knew that her niece was badly in want of money.  “The captain came down last night and personally pressed her to join them today.  So, not to be unpleasant, she determined to go.  They fetched her in the pony-chaise, and are going to bring her back.”