affected the beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends.  It was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see, might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those lives which had been brought under its influence.  This belief was confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community, had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.

It was the morning of his departure.  His brothers had already left the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one was to return to his college, and the other to his curacy.  Angel might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart at Talbothays.  He would have been an awkward member of the party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.  To neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.

His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him, on his own mare, a little way along the road.  Having fairly well advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as they jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father’s account of his parish difficulties, and the coldness of brother clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious Calvinistic doctrine.

“Pernicious!” said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea.  He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.

As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young upstart squire named d’Urberville, living some forty miles off, in the neighbourhood of Trantridge.

“Not one of the ancient d’Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?” asked his son.  “That curiously historic worn-out family with its ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?”

“O no.  The original d’Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty or eighty years ago—­at least, I believe so.  This seems to be a new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former knightly line I hope they are spurious, I’m sure.  But it is odd to hear you express interest in old families.  I thought you set less store by them even than I.”