Clare received directions how to find the house, and hastened

thither, arriving with the milkman. The Herons, though an ordinary

villa, stood in its own grounds, and was certainly the last place

in which one would have expected to find lodgings, so private was

its appearance. If poor Tess was a servant here, as he feared, she

would go to the back-door to that milkman, and he was inclined to go

thither also. However, in his doubts he turned to the front, and

rang. The hour being early, the landlady herself opened the door. Clare

inquired for Teresa d'Urberville or Durbeyfield. "Mrs d'Urberville?"

"Yes." Tess, then, passed as a married woman, and he felt glad, even though

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she had not adopted his name. "Will you kindly tell her that a relative is anxious to see her?"

"It is rather early. What name shall I give, sir?"

"Angel."

"Mr Angel?" "No; Angel. It is my Christian name. She'll understand."

"I'll see if she is awake." He was shown into the front room--the dining-room--and looked out

through the spring curtains at the little lawn, and the rhododendrons

and other shrubs upon it. Obviously her position was by no means so

bad as he had feared, and it crossed his mind that she must somehow

have claimed and sold the jewels to attain it. He did not blame her

for one moment. Soon his sharpened ear detected footsteps upon the

stairs, at which his heart thumped so painfully that he could hardly

stand firm. "Dear me! what will she think of me, so altered as I

am!" he said to himself; and the door opened.

Tess appeared on the threshold--not at all as he had expected to

see her--bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her great natural beauty

was, if not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She

was loosely wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white,

embroidered in half-mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same

hue. Her neck rose out of a frill of down, and her well-remembered

cable of dark-brown hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the

back of her head and partly hanging on her shoulder--the evident

result of haste. He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side;

for she had not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the

doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was now, he felt the contrast

between them, and thought his appearance distasteful to her.

"Tess!" he said huskily, "can you forgive me for going away? Can't

you--come to me? How do you get to be--like this?"




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