That five minutes of overhearing furnished Eustacia with visions enough to fill the whole blank afternoon.  Such sudden alternations from mental vacuity do sometimes occur thus quietly.  She could never have believed in the morning that her colourless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope, and that without the arrival of a single visitor.  The words of Sam and Humphrey on the harmony between the unknown and herself had on her mind the effect of the invading Bard’s prelude in the “Castle of Indolence,” at which myriads of imprisoned shapes arose where had previously appeared the stillness of a void.

Involved in these imaginings she knew nothing of time.  When she became conscious of externals it was dusk.  The furze-rick was finished; the men had gone home.  Eustacia went upstairs, thinking that she would take a walk at this her usual time; and she determined that her walk should be in the direction of Blooms-End, the birthplace of young Yeobright and the present home of his mother.  She had no reason for walking elsewhere, and why should she not go that way?  The scene of a day-dream is sufficient for a pilgrimage at nineteen.  To look at the palings before the Yeobrights’ house had the dignity of a necessary performance.  Strange that such a piece of idling should have seemed an important errand.

She put on her bonnet, and, leaving the house, descended the hill on the side towards Blooms-End, where she walked slowly along the valley for a distance of a mile and a half.  This brought her to a spot in which the green bottom of the dale began to widen, the furze bushes to recede yet further from the path on each side, till they were diminished to an isolated one here and there by the increasing fertility of the soil.  Beyond the irregular carpet of grass was a row of white palings, which marked the verge of the heath in this latitude.  They showed upon the dusky scene that they bordered as distinctly as white lace on velvet.  Behind the white palings was a little garden; behind the garden an old, irregular, thatched house, facing the heath, and commanding a full view of the valley.  This was the obscure, removed spot to which was about to return a man whose latter life had been passed in the French capital—­the centre and vortex of the fashionable world.

II

The People at Blooms-End Make Ready

All that afternoon the expected arrival of the subject of Eustacia’s ruminations created a bustle of preparation at Blooms-End.  Thomasin had been persuaded by her aunt, and by an instinctive impulse of loyalty towards her cousin Clym, to bestir herself on his account with an alacrity unusual in her during these most sorrowful days of her life.  At the time that Eustacia was listening to the rickmakers’ conversation on Clym’s return, Thomasin was climbing into a loft over her aunt’s fuel-house, where the store-apples were kept, to search out the best and largest of them for the coming holiday-time.