When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground.  Still higher, on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its earthen trenches.  From hereabout the long road was fairly level for some distance onward.  They mounted in front of the waggon, and Abraham grew reflective.

“Tess!” he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.

“Yes, Abraham.”

“Bain’t you glad that we’ve become gentlefolk?”

“Not particular glad.”

“But you be glad that you ’m going to marry a gentleman?”

“What?” said Tess, lifting her face.

“That our great relation will help ’ee to marry a gentleman.”

“I?  Our great relation?  We have no such relation.  What has put that into your head?”

“I heard ’em talking about it up at Rolliver’s when I went to find father.  There’s a rich lady of our family out at Trantridge, and mother said that if you claimed kin with the lady, she’d put ’ee in the way of marrying a gentleman.”

His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a pondering silence.  Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for audition, so that his sister’s abstraction was of no account.  He leant back against the hives, and with upturned face made observations on the stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in serene dissociation from these two wisps of human life.  He asked how far away those twinklers were, and whether God was on the other side of them.  But ever and anon his childish prattle recurred to what impressed his imagination even more deeply than the wonders of creation.  If Tess were made rich by marrying a gentleman, would she have money enough to buy a spyglass so large that it would draw the stars as near to her as Nettlecombe-Tout?

The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole family, filled Tess with impatience.

“Never mind that now!” she exclaimed.

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”

“Yes.”

“All like ours?”

“I don’t know; but I think so.  They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree.  Most of them splendid and sound—­a few blighted.”

“Which do we live on—­a splendid one or a blighted one?”

“A blighted one.”

“’Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were so many more of ’em!”

“Yes.”

“Is it like that really, Tess?” said Abraham, turning to her much impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information.  “How would it have been if we had pitched on a sound one?”

“Well, father wouldn’t have coughed and creeped about as he does, and wouldn’t have got too tipsy to go on this journey; and mother wouldn’t have been always washing, and never getting finished.”