...  I must cry to you in my trouble—­I have no one else! ...  I think I must die if you do not come soon, or tell me to come to you... please, please, not to be just—­only a little kind to me ...  If you would come, I could die in your arms!  I would be well content to do that if so be you had forgiven me! ... if you will send me one little line, and say, “I am coming soon,” I will bide on, Angel—­O, so cheerfully! ... 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. ...  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. ...  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!

Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her more recent and severer regard of him, but would go and find her immediately.  He asked his father if she had applied for any money during his absence.  His father returned a negative, and then for the first time it occurred to Angel that her pride had stood in her way, and that she had suffered privation.  From his remarks his parents now gathered the real reason of the separation; and their Christianity was such that, reprobates being their especial care, the tenderness towards Tess which her blood, her simplicity, even her poverty, had not engendered, was instantly excited by her sin.

Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles for his journey he glanced over a poor plain missive also lately come to hand—­the one from Marian and Izz Huett, beginning—­

“Honour’d Sir, Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do love you,” and signed, “From Two Well-Wishers.”

LIV

In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house, whence his mother watched his thin figure as it disappeared into the street.  He had declined to borrow his father’s old mare, well knowing of its necessity to the household.  He went to the inn, where he hired a trap, and could hardly wait during the harnessing.  In a very few minutes after, he was driving up the hill out of the town which, three or four months earlier in the year, Tess had descended with such hopes and ascended with such shattered purposes.

Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and trees purple with buds; but he was looking at other things, and only recalled himself to the scene sufficiently to enable him to keep the way.  In something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of the King’s Hintock estates and ascended to the untoward solitude of Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone whereon Tess had been compelled by Alec d’Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the strange oath that she would never wilfully tempt him again.  The pale and blasted nettle-stems of the preceding year even now lingered nakedly in the banks, young green nettles of the present spring growing from their roots.