He deemed it best not to put his parents into communication with her by informing them of her address; and, being unaware of what had really happened to estrange the two, neither his father nor his mother suggested that he should do so.  During the day he left the parsonage, for what he had to complete he wished to get done quickly.

As the last duty before leaving this part of England it was necessary for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse, in which he had spent with Tess the first three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent having to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had occupied, and two or three small articles fetched away that they had left behind.  It was under this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown upon his life had stretched its gloom over him.  Yet when he had unlocked the door of the sitting-room and looked into it, the memory which returned first upon him was that of their happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first fresh sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first meal together, the chatting by the fire with joined hands.

The farmer and his wife were in the field at the moment of his visit, and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time.  Inwardly swollen with a renewal of sentiment that he had not quite reckoned with, he went upstairs to her chamber, which had never been his.  The bed was smooth as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of leaving.  The mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed it.  Having been there three or four weeks it was turning colour, and the leaves and berries were wrinkled.  Angel took it down and crushed it into the grate.  Standing there, he for the first time doubted whether his course in this conjecture had been a wise, much less a generous, one.  But had he not been cruelly blinded?  In the incoherent multitude of his emotions he knelt down at the bedside wet-eyed.  “O Tess!  If you had only told me sooner, I would have forgiven you!” he mourned.

Hearing a footstep below, he rose and went to the top of the stairs.  At the bottom of the flight he saw a woman standing, and on her turning up her face recognized the pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.

“Mr Clare,” she said, “I’ve called to see you and Mrs Clare, and to inquire if ye be well.  I thought you might be back here again.”

This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had not yet guessed his; an honest girl who loved him—­one who would have made as good, or nearly as good, a practical farmer’s wife as Tess.

“I am here alone,” he said; “we are not living here now.”  Explaining why he had come, he asked, “Which way are you going home, Izz?”

“I have no home at Talbothays Dairy now, sir,” she said.

“Why is that?”

Izz looked down.

“It was so dismal there that I left!  I am staying out this way.”  She pointed in a contrary direction, the direction in which he was journeying.