’He never posted his letters to her in the parish—­it was remarked at the time.  I was thinking if something relating to her address might not be found in the report of the inquest in the Casterbridge Chronicle of the date.  Some facts about the inquest were given in the papers to a certainty.’

Her brother caught eagerly at the suggestion.  ’Who has a file of the Chronicles?’ he said.

‘Mr. Raunham used to file them,’ said Cytherea.  ’He was rather friendly-disposed towards me, too.’

Owen could not, on any consideration, escape from his attendance at the church-building till Saturday evening; and thus it became necessary, unless they actually wasted time, that Cytherea herself should assist.  ‘I act under your orders, Owen,’ she said.

XVI.  THE EVENTS OF ONE WEEK

1.  MARCH THE SIXTH

The next morning the opening move of the game was made.  Cytherea, under cover of a thick veil, hired a conveyance and drove to within a mile or so of Carriford.  It was with a renewed sense of depression that she saw again the objects which had become familiar to her eye during her sojourn under Miss Aldclyffe’s roof—­the outline of the hills, the meadow streams, the old park trees.  She hastened by a lonely path to the rectory-house, and asked if Mr. Raunham was at home.

Now the rector, though a solitary bachelor, was as gallant and courteous to womankind as an ancient Iberian; and, moreover, he was Cytherea’s friend in particular, to an extent far greater than she had ever surmised.  Rarely visiting his relative, Miss Aldclyffe, except on parish matters, more rarely still being called upon by Miss Aldclyffe, Cytherea had learnt very little of him whilst she lived at Knapwater.  The relationship was on the impecunious paternal side, and for this branch of her family the lady of the estate had never evinced much sympathy.  In looking back upon our line of descent it is an instinct with us to feel that all our vitality was drawn from the richer party to any unequal marriage in the chain.

Since the death of the old captain, the rector’s bearing in Knapwater House had been almost that of a stranger, a circumstance which he himself was the last man in the world to regret.  This polite indifference was so frigid on both sides that the rector did not concern himself to preach at her, which was a great deal in a rector; and she did not take the trouble to think his sermons poor stuff, which in a cynical woman was a great deal more.

Though barely fifty years of age, his hair was as white as snow, contrasting strangely with the redness of his skin, which was as fresh and healthy as a lad’s.  Cytherea’s bright eyes, mutely and demurely glancing up at him Sunday after Sunday, had been the means of driving away many of the saturnine humours that creep into an empty heart during the hours of a solitary life; in this case, however, to supplant them, when she left his parish, by those others of a more aching nature which accompany an over-full one.  In short, he had been on the verge of feeling towards her that passion to which his dignified self-respect would not give its true name, even in the privacy of his own thought.