She was so pale when he saw her again that he felt quite anxious.  The incident of the misplaced letter she had jumped at as if it prevented a confession; but she knew in her conscience that it need not; there was still time.  Yet everything was in a stir; there was coming and going; all had to dress, the dairyman and Mrs Crick having been asked to accompany them as witnesses; and reflection or deliberate talk was well-nigh impossible.  The only minute Tess could get to be alone with Clare was when they met upon the landing.

“I am so anxious to talk to you—­I want to confess all my faults and blunders!” she said with attempted lightness.

“No, no—­we can’t have faults talked of—­you must be deemed perfect to-day at least, my Sweet!” he cried.  “We shall have plenty of time, hereafter, I hope, to talk over our failings.  I will confess mine at the same time.”

“But it would be better for me to do it now, I think, so that you could not say—­”

“Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything—­say, as soon as we are settled in our lodging; not now.  I, too, will tell you my faults then.  But do not let us spoil the day with them; they will be excellent matter for a dull time.”

“Then you don’t wish me to, dearest?”

“I do not, Tessy, really.”

The hurry of dressing and starting left no time for more than this.  Those words of his seemed to reassure her on further reflection.  She was whirled onward through the next couple of critical hours by the mastering tide of her devotion to him, which closed up further meditation.  Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to call him her lord, her own—­then, if necessary, to die—­had at last lifted her up from her plodding reflective pathway.  In dressing, she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

The church was a long way off, and they were obliged to drive, particularly as it was winter.  A closed carriage was ordered from a roadside inn, a vehicle which had been kept there ever since the old days of post-chaise travelling.  It had stout wheel-spokes, and heavy felloes a great curved bed, immense straps and springs, and a pole like a battering-ram.  The postilion was a venerable “boy” of sixty—­a martyr to rheumatic gout, the result of excessive exposure in youth, counter-acted by strong liquors—­who had stood at inn-doors doing nothing for the whole five-and-twenty years that had elapsed since he had no longer been required to ride professionally, as if expecting the old times to come back again.  He had a permanent running wound on the outside of his right leg, originated by the constant bruisings of aristocratic carriage-poles during the many years that he had been in regular employ at the King’s Arms, Casterbridge.