But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant was she to take it.  The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be called, on Clare’s account, which had led her to hide from her own parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her.  They probably despised her already; how much more they would despise her in the character of a mendicant!  The consequence was that by no effort could the parson’s daughter-in-law bring herself to let him know her state.

Her reluctance to communicate with her husband’s parents might, she thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the reverse obtained.  On her leaving their house after the short visit subsequent to her marriage they were under the impression that she was ultimately going to join her husband; and from that time to the present she had done nothing to disturb their belief that she was awaiting his return in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey to Brazil would result in a short stay only, after which he would come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to join him; in any case that they would soon present a united front to their families and the world.  This hope she still fostered.  To let her parents know that she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had relieved their necessities, on her own hands for a living, after the eclat of a marriage which was to nullify the collapse of the first attempt, would be too much indeed.

The set of brilliants returned to her mind.  Where Clare had deposited them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were true that she could only use and not sell them.  Even were they absolutely hers it would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal title to them which was not essentially hers at all.

Meanwhile her husband’s days had been by no means free from trial.  At this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers and farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going thither by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the baseless assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on English uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they had been born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which they were surprised on Brazilian plains.

To return.  Thus it happened that when the last of Tess’s sovereigns had been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place, while on account of the season she found it increasingly difficult to get employment.  Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy, health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses, people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other than rural.  From that direction of gentility Black Care had come.  Society might be better than she supposed from her slight experience of it.  But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid its purlieus.