“Why—­O what?” She drew closer, and whispered in her mother’s ear, “Does he seem to you not likely to befriend us?  I thought he looked a generous man.  What a gentleman he is, isn’t he? and how his diamond studs shine!  How strange that you should have said he might be in the stocks, or in the workhouse, or dead!  Did ever anything go more by contraries!  Why do you feel so afraid of him?  I am not at all; I’ll call upon him—­he can but say he don’t own such remote kin.”

“I don’t know at all—­I can’t tell what to set about.  I feel so down.”

“Don’t be that, mother, now we have got here and all!  Rest there where you be a little while—­I will look on and find out more about him.”

“I don’t think I can ever meet Mr. Henchard.  He is not how I thought he would be—­he overpowers me!  I don’t wish to see him any more.”

“But wait a little time and consider.”

Elizabeth-Jane had never been so much interested in anything in her life as in their present position, partly from the natural elation she felt at discovering herself akin to a coach; and she gazed again at the scene.  The younger guests were talking and eating with animation; their elders were searching for titbits, and sniffing and grunting over their plates like sows nuzzling for acorns.  Three drinks seemed to be sacred to the company—­port, sherry, and rum; outside which old-established trinity few or no palates ranged.

A row of ancient rummers with ground figures on their sides, and each primed with a spoon, was now placed down the table, and these were promptly filled with grog at such high temperatures as to raise serious considerations for the articles exposed to its vapours.  But Elizabeth-Jane noticed that, though this filling went on with great promptness up and down the table, nobody filled the Mayor’s glass, who still drank large quantities of water from the tumbler behind the clump of crystal vessels intended for wine and spirits.

“They don’t fill Mr. Henchard’s wine-glasses,” she ventured to say to her elbow acquaintance, the old man.

“Ah, no; don’t ye know him to be the celebrated abstaining worthy of that name?  He scorns all tempting liquors; never touches nothing.  O yes, he’ve strong qualities that way.  I have heard tell that he sware a gospel oath in bygone times, and has bode by it ever since.  So they don’t press him, knowing it would be unbecoming in the face of that:  for yer gospel oath is a serious thing.”

Another elderly man, hearing this discourse, now joined in by inquiring, “How much longer have he got to suffer from it, Solomon Longways?”

“Another two year, they say.  I don’t know the why and the wherefore of his fixing such a time, for ’a never has told anybody.  But ’tis exactly two calendar years longer, they say.  A powerful mind to hold out so long!”

“True....But there’s great strength in hope.  Knowing that in four-and-twenty months’ time ye’ll be out of your bondage, and able to make up for all you’ve suffered, by partaking without stint—­why, it keeps a man up, no doubt.”