Here they settled themselves; and on each day of their lives Henchard anticipated her every wish with a watchfulness in which paternal regard was heightened by a burning jealous dread of rivalry.  Yet that Newson would ever now return to Casterbridge to claim her as a daughter there was little reason to suppose.  He was a wanderer and a stranger, almost an alien; he had not seen his daughter for several years; his affection for her could not in the nature of things be keen; other interests would probably soon obscure his recollections of her, and prevent any such renewal of inquiry into the past as would lead to a discovery that she was still a creature of the present.  To satisfy his conscience somewhat Henchard repeated to himself that the lie which had retained for him the coveted treasure had not been deliberately told to that end, but had come from him as the last defiant word of a despair which took no thought of consequences.  Furthermore he pleaded within himself that no Newson could love her as he loved her, or would tend her to his life’s extremity as he was prepared to do cheerfully.

Thus they lived on in the shop overlooking the churchyard, and nothing occurred to mark their days during the remainder of the year.  Going out but seldom, and never on a marketday, they saw Donald Farfrae only at rarest intervals, and then mostly as a transitory object in the distance of the street.  Yet he was pursuing his ordinary avocations, smiling mechanically to fellow-tradesmen, and arguing with bargainers—­as bereaved men do after a while.

Time, “in his own grey style,” taught Farfrae how to estimate his experience of Lucetta—­all that it was, and all that it was not.  There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity—­even the reverse, indeed, and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete.  But Farfrae was not of those.  It was inevitable that the insight, briskness, and rapidity of his nature should take him out of the dead blank which his loss threw about him.  He could not but perceive that by the death of Lucetta he had exchanged a looming misery for a simple sorrow.  After that revelation of her history, which must have come sooner or later in any circumstances, it was hard to believe that life with her would have been productive of further happiness.

But as a memory, nothwithstanding such conditions, Lucetta’s image still lived on with him, her weaknesses provoking only the gentlest criticism, and her sufferings attenuating wrath at her concealments to a momentary spark now and then.