“Why—­it is your husband’s old patron!” said Mrs. Blowbody, a lady of the neighbourhood who sat beside Lucetta.

“Patron!” said Donald’s wife with quick indignation.

“Do you say the man is an acquaintance of Mr. Farfrae’s?” observed Mrs. Bath, the physician’s wife, a new-comer to the town through her recent marriage with the doctor.

“He works for my husband,” said Lucetta.

“Oh—­is that all?  They have been saying to me that it was through him your husband first got a footing in Casterbridge.  What stories people will tell!”

“They will indeed.  It was not so at all.  Donald’s genius would have enabled him to get a footing anywhere, without anybody’s help!  He would have been just the same if there had been no Henchard in the world!”

It was partly Lucetta’s ignorance of the circumstances of Donald’s arrival which led her to speak thus, partly the sensation that everybody seemed bent on snubbing her at this triumphant time.  The incident had occupied but a few moments, but it was necessarily witnessed by the Royal Personage, who, however, with practised tact affected not to have noticed anything unusual.  He alighted, the Mayor advanced, the address was read; the Illustrious Personage replied, then said a few words to Farfrae, and shook hands with Lucetta as the Mayor’s wife.  The ceremony occupied but a few minutes, and the carriages rattled heavily as Pharaoh’s chariots down Corn Street and out upon the Budmouth Road, in continuation of the journey coastward.

In the crowd stood Coney, Buzzford, and Longways “Some difference between him now and when he zung at the Dree Mariners,” said the first.  “‘Tis wonderful how he could get a lady of her quality to go snacks wi’ en in such quick time.”

“True.  Yet how folk do worship fine clothes!  Now there’s a better-looking woman than she that nobody notices at all, because she’s akin to that hontish fellow Henchard.”

“I could worship ye, Buzz, for saying that,” remarked Nance Mockridge.  “I do like to see the trimming pulled off such Christmas candles.  I am quite unequal to the part of villain myself, or I’d gi’e all my small silver to see that lady toppered....And perhaps I shall soon,” she added significantly.

“That’s not a noble passiont for a ’oman to keep up,” said Longways.

Nance did not reply, but every one knew what she meant.  The ideas diffused by the reading of Lucetta’s letters at Peter’s finger had condensed into a scandal, which was spreading like a miasmatic fog through Mixen Lane, and thence up the back streets of Casterbridge.

The mixed assemblage of idlers known to each other presently fell apart into two bands by a process of natural selection, the frequenters of Peter’s Finger going off Mixen Lanewards, where most of them lived, while Coney, Buzzford, Longways, and that connection remained in the street.

“You know what’s brewing down there, I suppose?” said Buzzford mysteriously to the others.