From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed her

embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of her cheek.

"I--don't know exactly where she is staying," she answered. "She

was--but--" "Where was she?"

"Well, she is not there now." In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger children had by

this time crept to the door, where, pulling at his mother's skirts,

the youngest murmured-"Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?"

"He has married her," Joan whispered. "Go inside." Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked-"Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her? If not, of

course--"

"I don't think she would."

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"Are you sure?"

"I am sure she wouldn't." He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess's tender letter.

"I am sure she would!" he retorted passionately. "I know her better

than you do."

"That's very likely, sir; for I have never really known her."

"Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in kindness to a lonely

wretched man!" Tess's mother again restlessly swept her cheek with

her vertical hand, and seeing that he suffered, she at last said, is

a low voice-"She is at Sandbourne."

"Ah--where there? Sandbourne has become a large place, they say."

"I don't know more particularly than I have said--Sandbourne. For

myself, I was never there."

It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and he pressed her

no further. "Are you in want of anything?" he said gently.

"No, sir," she replied. "We are fairly well provided for."

Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a station

three miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he walked thither.

The last train to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare

on its wheels. LV At eleven o'clock that night, having secured a bed at one of the

hotels and telegraphed his address to his father immediately on his

arrival, he walked out into the streets of Sandbourne. It was too

late to call on or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed

his purpose till the morning. But he could not retire to rest just

yet. This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western

stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its

covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly

created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty.

An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at

hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a

glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up.

Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity

of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British

trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the

Caesars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's

gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.




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