Eustacia awoke.  The cracking had been that of the window shutter downstairs, which the maid-servant was opening to let in the day, now slowly increasing to Nature’s meagre allowance at this sickly time of the year.  “O that I had seen his face!” she said again. “’Twas meant for Mr. Yeobright!”

When she became cooler she perceived that many of the phases of the dream had naturally arisen out of the images and fancies of the day before.  But this detracted little from its interest, which lay in the excellent fuel it provided for newly kindled fervour.  She was at the modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called “having a fancy for.”  It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.

The perfervid woman was by this time half in love with a vision.  The fantastic nature of her passion, which lowered her as an intellect, raised her as a soul.  If she had had a little more self-control she would have attenuated the emotion to nothing by sheer reasoning, and so have killed it off.  If she had had a little less pride she might have gone and circumambulated the Yeobrights’ premises at Blooms-End at any maidenly sacrifice until she had seen him.  But Eustacia did neither of these things.  She acted as the most exemplary might have acted, being so influenced; she took an airing twice or thrice a day upon the Egdon hills, and kept her eyes employed.

The first occasion passed, and he did not come that way.

She promenaded a second time, and was again the sole wanderer there.

The third time there was a dense fog; she looked around, but without much hope.  Even if he had been walking within twenty yards of her she could not have seen him.

At the fourth attempt to encounter him it began to rain in torrents, and she turned back.

The fifth sally was in the afternoon:  it was fine, and she remained out long, walking to the very top of the valley in which Blooms-End lay.  She saw the white paling about half a mile off; but he did not appear.  It was almost with heart-sickness that she came home and with a sense of shame at her weakness.  She resolved to look for the man from Paris no more.

But Providence is nothing if not coquettish; and no sooner had Eustacia formed this resolve than the opportunity came which, while sought, had been entirely withholden.

IV

Eustacia Is Led On to an Adventure

In the evening of this last day of expectation, which was the twenty-third of December, Eustacia was at home alone.  She had passed the recent hour in lamenting over a rumour newly come to her ears—­that Yeobright’s visit to his mother was to be of short duration, and would end some time the next week.  “Naturally,” she said to herself.  A man in the full swing of his activities in a gay city could not afford to linger long on Egdon Heath.  That she would behold face to face the owner of the awakening voice within the limits of such a holiday was most unlikely, unless she were to haunt the environs of his mother’s house like a robin, to do which was difficult and unseemly.