this?  Dear, if you would only be a little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as to see that you were strong enough to work this change in me, you would perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.

How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could trust you always to love me!  I ought to have known that such as that was not for poor me.  But I am sick at heart, not only for old times, but for the present.  Think—­think how it do hurt my heart not to see you ever—­ever!  Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one.

People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel (handsome is the word they use, since I wish to be truthful).  Perhaps I am what they say.  But I do not value my good looks; I only like to have them because they belong to you, my dear, and that there may be at least one thing about me worth your having.  So much have I felt this, that when I met with annoyance on account of the same, I tied up my face in a bandage as long as people would believe in it.  O Angel, I tell you all this not from vanity—­you will certainly know I do not—­but only that you may come to me!

If you really cannot come to me, will you let me come to you?  I am, as I say, worried, pressed to do what I will not do.  It cannot be that I shall yield one inch, yet I am in terror as to what an accident might lead to, and I so defenceless on account of my first error.  I cannot say more about this—­it makes me too miserable.  But if I break down by falling into some fearful snare, my last state will be worse than my first.  O God, I cannot think of it!  Let me come at once, or at once come to me!

   I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your
   servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be
   near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.

The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I don’t like to see the rooks and starlings in the field, because I grieve and grieve to miss you who used to see them with me.  I long for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own dear!  Come to me—­come to me, and save me from what threatens me!—­

   Your faithful heartbroken

   TESS

XLIX

The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of the quiet Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the air is so soft and the soil so rich that the effort of growth requires but superficial aid by comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to Tess the human world seemed so different (though it was much the same).  It was purely for security that she had been requested by Angel to send her communications through his father, whom he kept pretty well informed of his changing addresses in the country he had gone to exploit for himself with a heavy heart.