He could hardly discern her till, glancing inquiringly, he said, “What—­Miss Henchard—­and are ye up so airly?”

She asked him to pardon her for waylaying him at such an unseemly time.  “But I am anxious to mention something,” she said.  “And I wished not to alarm Mrs. Farfrae by calling.”

“Yes?” said he, with the cheeriness of a superior.  “And what may it be?  It’s very kind of ye, I’m sure.”

She now felt the difficulty of conveying to his mind the exact aspect of possibilities in her own.  But she somehow began, and introduced Henchard’s name.  “I sometimes fear,” she said with an effort, “that he may be betrayed into some attempt to—­insult you, sir.

“But we are the best of friends?”

“Or to play some practical joke upon you, sir.  Remember that he has been hardly used.”

“But we are quite friendly?”

“Or to do something—­that would injure you—­hurt you—­wound you.”  Every word cost her twice its length of pain.  And she could see that Farfrae was still incredulous.  Henchard, a poor man in his employ, was not to Farfrae’s view the Henchard who had ruled him.  Yet he was not only the same man, but that man with his sinister qualities, formerly latent, quickened into life by his buffetings.

Farfrae, happy, and thinking no evil, persisted in making light of her fears.  Thus they parted, and she went homeward, journeymen now being in the street, waggoners going to the harness-makers for articles left to be repaired, farm-horses going to the shoeing-smiths, and the sons of labour showing themselves generally on the move.  Elizabeth entered her lodging unhappily, thinking she had done no good, and only made herself appear foolish by her weak note of warning.

But Donald Farfrae was one of those men upon whom an incident is never absolutely lost.  He revised impressions from a subsequent point of view, and the impulsive judgment of the moment was not always his permanent one.  The vision of Elizabeth’s earnest face in the rimy dawn came back to him several times during the day.  Knowing the solidity of her character he did not treat her hints altogether as idle sounds.

But he did not desist from a kindly scheme on Henchard’s account that engaged him just then; and when he met Lawyer Joyce, the town-clerk, later in the day, he spoke of it as if nothing had occurred to damp it.

“About that little seedsman’s shop,” he said, “the shop overlooking the churchyard, which is to let.  It is not for myself I want it, but for our unlucky fellow-townsman Henchard.  It would be a new beginning for him, if a small one; and I have told the Council that I would head a private subscription among them to set him up in it—­that I would be fifty pounds, if they would make up the other fifty among them.”

“Yes, yes; so I’ve heard; and there’s nothing to say against it for that matter,” the town-clerk replied, in his plain, frank way.  “But, Farfrae, others see what you don’t.  Henchard hates ’ee—­ay, hates ’ee; and ’tis right that you should know it.  To my knowledge he was at the Three Mariners last night, saying in public that about you which a man ought not to say about another.”