A visit to the boy suggested itself as a means of gleaning new particulars; though it might be quite unproductive.  To probe a child’s mind after the lapse of six weeks, not for facts which the child had seen and understood, but to get at those which were in their nature beyond him, did not promise much; yet when every obvious channel is blocked we grope towards the small and obscure.  There was nothing else left to do; after that he would allow the enigma to drop into the abyss of undiscoverable things.

It was about daybreak when he had reached this decision, and he at once arose.  He locked up the house and went out into the green patch which merged in heather further on.  In front of the white garden-palings the path branched into three like a broad-arrow.  The road to the right led to the Quiet Woman and its neighbourhood; the middle track led to Mistover Knap; the left-hand track led over the hill to another part of Mistover, where the child lived.  On inclining into the latter path Yeobright felt a creeping chilliness, familiar enough to most people, and probably caused by the unsunned morning air.  In after days he thought of it as a thing of singular significance.

When Yeobright reached the cottage of Susan Nunsuch, the mother of the boy he sought, he found that the inmates were not yet astir.  But in upland hamlets the transition from a-bed to abroad is surprisingly swift and easy.  There no dense partition of yawns and toilets divides humanity by night from humanity by day.  Yeobright tapped at the upper window-sill, which he could reach with his walking-stick; and in three or four minutes the woman came down.

It was not till this moment that Clym recollected her to be the person who had behaved so barbarously to Eustacia.  It partly explained the insuavity with which the woman greeted him.  Moreover, the boy had been ailing again; and Susan now, as ever since the night when he had been pressed into Eustacia’s service at the bonfire, attributed his indispositions to Eustacia’s influence as a witch.  It was one of those sentiments which lurk like moles underneath the visible surface of manners, and may have been kept alive by Eustacia’s entreaty to the captain, at the time that he had intended to prosecute Susan for the pricking in church, to let the matter drop; which he accordingly had done.

Yeobright overcame his repugnance, for Susan had at least borne his mother no ill-will.  He asked kindly for the boy; but her manner did not improve.

“I wish to see him,” continued Yeobright, with some hesitation; “to ask him if he remembers anything more of his walk with my mother than what he has previously told.”

She regarded him in a peculiar and criticizing manner.  To anybody but a half-blind man it would have said, “You want another of the knocks which have already laid you so low.”

She called the boy downstairs, asked Clym to sit down on a stool, and continued, “Now, Johnny, tell Mr. Yeobright anything you can call to mind.”