“Yes, it is,” he said.  “But it is not by what is, in this life, but by what appears, that you are judged; and I therefore think you ought to accept me—­for your own good name’s sake.  What is known in your native Jersey may get known here.”

“How you keep on about Jersey!  I am English!”

“Yes, yes.  Well, what do you say to my proposal?”

For the first time in their acquaintance Lucetta had the move; and yet she was backward.  “For the present let things be,” she said with some embarrassment.  “Treat me as an acquaintance, and I’ll treat you as one.  Time will—­” She stopped; and he said nothing to fill the gap for awhile, there being no pressure of half acquaintance to drive them into speech if they were not minded for it.

“That’s the way the wind blows, is it?” he said at last grimly, nodding an affirmative to his own thoughts.

A yellow flood of reflected sunlight filled the room for a few instants.  It was produced by the passing of a load of newly trussed hay from the country, in a waggon marked with Farfrae’s name.  Beside it rode Farfrae himself on horseback.  Lucetta’s face became—­as a woman’s face becomes when the man she loves rises upon her gaze like an apparition.

A turn of the eye by Henchard, a glance from the window, and the secret of her inaccessibility would have been revealed.  But Henchard in estimating her tone was looking down so plumb-straight that he did not note the warm consciousness upon Lucetta’s face.

“I shouldn’t have thought it—­I shouldn’t have thought it of women!” he said emphatically by-and-by, rising and shaking himself into activity; while Lucetta was so anxious to divert him from any suspicion of the truth that she asked him to be in no hurry.  Bringing him some apples she insisted upon paring one for him.

He would not take it.  “No, no; such is not for me,” he said drily, and moved to the door.  At going out he turned his eye upon her.

“You came to live in Casterbridge entirely on my account,” he said.  “Yet now you are here you won’t have anything to say to my offer!”

He had hardly gone down the staircase when she dropped upon the sofa and jumped up again in a fit of desperation.  “I will love him!” she cried passionately; “as for him—­he’s hot-tempered and stern, and it would be madness to bind myself to him knowing that.  I won’t be a slave to the past—­I’ll love where I choose!”

Yet having decided to break away from Henchard one might have supposed her capable of aiming higher than Farfrae.  But Lucetta reasoned nothing:  she feared hard words from the people with whom she had been earlier associated; she had no relatives left; and with native lightness of heart took kindly to what fate offered.

Elizabeth-Jane, surveying the position of Lucetta between her two lovers from the crystalline sphere of a straightforward mind, did not fail to perceive that her father, as she called him, and Donald Farfrae became more desperately enamoured of her friend every day.  On Farfrae’s side it was the unforced passion of youth.  On Henchard’s the artificially stimulated coveting of maturer age.