“I have, I have,” groaned Lucetta, her limbs hanging like fluid, from very misery and faintness.  “Michael, please don’t argue it any more!”

“I will not,” he said.  And taking up his hat he went away.

Elizabeth-Jane continued to kneel by Lucetta.  “What is this?” she said.  “You called my father ‘Michael’ as if you knew him well?  And how is it he has got this power over you, that you promise to marry him against your will?  Ah—­you have many many secrets from me!”

“Perhaps you have some from me,” Lucetta murmured with closed eyes, little thinking, however, so unsuspicious was she, that the secret of Elizabeth’s heart concerned the young man who had caused this damage to her own.

“I would not—­do anything against you at all!” stammered Elizabeth, keeping in all signs of emotion till she was ready to burst.  “I cannot understand how my father can command you so; I don’t sympathize with him in it at all.  I’ll go to him and ask him to release you.”

“No, no,” said Lucetta.  “Let it all be.”

28.

The next morning Henchard went to the Town Hall below Lucetta’s house, to attend Petty Sessions, being still a magistrate for the year by virtue of his late position as Mayor.  In passing he looked up at her windows, but nothing of her was to be seen.

Henchard as a Justice of the Peace may at first seem to be an even greater incongruity than Shallow and Silence themselves.  But his rough and ready perceptions, his sledge-hammer directness, had often served him better than nice legal knowledge in despatching such simple business as fell to his hands in this Court.  To-day Dr. Chalkfield, the Mayor for the year, being absent, the corn-merchant took the big chair, his eyes still abstractedly stretching out of the window to the ashlar front of High-Place Hall.

There was one case only, and the offender stood before him.  She was an old woman of mottled countenance, attired in a shawl of that nameless tertiary hue which comes, but cannot be made—­a hue neither tawny, russet, hazel, nor ash; a sticky black bonnet that seemed to have been worn in the country of the Psalmist where the clouds drop fatness; and an apron that had been white in time so comparatively recent as still to contrast visibly with the rest of her clothes.  The steeped aspect of the woman as a whole showed her to be no native of the country-side or even of a country-town.

She looked cursorily at Henchard and the second magistrate, and Henchard looked at her, with a momentary pause, as if she had reminded him indistinctly of somebody or something which passed from his mind as quickly as it had come.  “Well, and what has she been doing?” he said, looking down at the charge sheet.

“She is charged, sir, with the offence of disorderly female and nuisance,” whispered Stubberd.

“Where did she do that?” said the other magistrate.

“By the church, sir, of all the horrible places in the world!—­I caught her in the act, your worship.”