“I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had kept the practice which went with it!”

“I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little.  To-morrow I shall expect to hear your mother’s goods unloading...  Give me your hand on it now—­dear, beautiful Tess!”

With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a murmur, and put his hand in at the half-open casement.  With stormy eyes she pulled the stay-bar quickly, and, in doing so, caught his arm between the casement and the stone mullion.

“Damnation—­you are very cruel!” he said, snatching out his arm.  “No, no!—­I know you didn’t do it on purpose.  Well I shall expect you, or your mother and children at least.”

“I shall not come—­I have plenty of money!” she cried.

“Where?”

“At my father-in-law’s, if I ask for it.”

“IF you ask for it.  But you won’t, Tess; I know you; you’ll never ask for it—­you’ll starve first!”

With these words he rode off.  Just at the corner of the street he met the man with the paint-pot, who asked him if he had deserted the brethren.

“You go to the devil!” said d’Urberville.

Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden rebellious sense of injustice caused the region of her eyes to swell with the rush of hot tears thither.  Her husband, Angel Clare himself, had, like others, dealt out hard measure to her; surely he had!  She had never before admitted such a thought; but he had surely!  Never in her life—­she could swear it from the bottom of her soul—­had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had come.  Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand, and scribbled the following lines: 

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel!  I do
not deserve it.  I have thought it all over carefully,
and I can never, never forgive you!  You know that I
did not intend to wrong you—­why have you so wronged
me?  You are cruel, cruel indeed!  I will try to forget
you.  It is all injustice I have received at your
hands! 

          
                                                    T.

She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with her epistle, and then again took her listless place inside the window-panes.

It was just as well to write like that as to write tenderly.  How could he give way to entreaty?  The facts had not changed:  there was no new event to alter his opinion.

It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room.  The two biggest of the younger children had gone out with their mother; the four smallest, their ages ranging from three-and-a-half years to eleven, all in black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling their own little subjects.  Tess at length joined them, without lighting a candle.