Anyone who had stood by now would have pitied her, not so much on account of her exposure to weather, and isolation from all of humanity except the mouldered remains inside the tumulus; but for that other form of misery which was denoted by the slightly rocking movement that her feelings imparted to her person.  Extreme unhappiness weighed visibly upon her.  Between the drippings of the rain from her umbrella to her mantle, from her mantle to the heather, from the heather to the earth, very similar sounds could be heard coming from her lips; and the tearfulness of the outer scene was repeated upon her face.  The wings of her soul were broken by the cruel obstructiveness of all about her; and even had she seen herself in a promising way of getting to Budmouth, entering a steamer, and sailing to some opposite port, she would have been but little more buoyant, so fearfully malignant were other things.  She uttered words aloud.  When a woman in such a situation, neither old, deaf, crazed, nor whimsical, takes upon herself to sob and soliloquize aloud there is something grievous the matter.

“Can I go, can I go?” she moaned.  “He’s not great enough for me to give myself to—­he does not suffice for my desire!...  If he had been a Saul or a Buonaparte—­ah!  But to break my marriage vow for him—­it is too poor a luxury!...  And I have no money to go alone!  And if I could, what comfort to me?  I must drag on next year, as I have dragged on this year, and the year after that as before.  How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me!...  I do not deserve my lot!” she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt.  “O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world!  I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control!  O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!”

The distant light which Eustacia had cursorily observed in leaving the house came, as she had divined, from the cottage window of Susan Nunsuch.  What Eustacia did not divine was the occupation of the woman within at that moment.  Susan’s sight of her passing figure earlier in the evening, not five minutes after the sick boy’s exclamation, “Mother, I do feel so bad!” persuaded the matron that an evil influence was certainly exercised by Eustacia’s propinquity.

On this account Susan did not go to bed as soon as the evening’s work was over, as she would have done at ordinary times.  To counteract the malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, the boy’s mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition, calculated to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on any human being against whom it was directed.  It was a practice well known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at the present day.