“You are still thinking, mother,” she said, when she turned inwards.

“Yes; I am thinking of Mr. Henchard’s sudden liking for that young man.  He was always so.  Now, surely, if he takes so warmly to people who are not related to him at all, may he not take as warmly to his own kin?”

While they debated this question a procession of five large waggons went past, laden with hay up to the bedroom windows.  They came in from the country, and the steaming horses had probably been travelling a great part of the night.  To the shaft of each hung a little board, on which was painted in white letters, “Henchard, corn-factor and hay-merchant.”  The spectacle renewed his wife’s conviction that, for her daughter’s sake, she should strain a point to rejoin him.

The discussion was continued during breakfast, and the end of it was that Mrs. Henchard decided, for good or for ill, to send Elizabeth-Jane with a message to Henchard, to the effect that his relative Susan, a sailor’s widow, was in the town; leaving it to him to say whether or not he would recognize her.  What had brought her to this determination were chiefly two things.  He had been described as a lonely widower; and he had expressed shame for a past transaction of his life.  There was promise in both.

“If he says no,” she enjoined, as Elizabeth-Jane stood, bonnet on, ready to depart; “if he thinks it does not become the good position he has reached to in the town, to own—­to let us call on him as—­his distant kinfolk, say, ’Then, sir, we would rather not intrude; we will leave Casterbridge as quietly as we have come, and go back to our own country.’...I almost feel that I would rather he did say so, as I have not seen him for so many years, and we are so—­little allied to him!”

“And if he say yes?” inquired the more sanguine one.

“In that case,” answered Mrs. Henchard cautiously, “ask him to write me a note, saying when and how he will see us—­or me.”

Elizabeth-Jane went a few steps towards the landing.  “And tell him,” continued her mother, “that I fully know I have no claim upon him—­that I am glad to find he is thriving; that I hope his life may be long and happy—­there, go.”  Thus with a half-hearted willingness, a smothered reluctance, did the poor forgiving woman start her unconscious daughter on this errand.

It was about ten o’clock, and market-day, when Elizabeth paced up the High Street, in no great hurry; for to herself her position was only that of a poor relation deputed to hunt up a rich one.  The front doors of the private houses were mostly left open at this warm autumn time, no thought of umbrella stealers disturbing the minds of the placid burgesses.  Hence, through the long, straight, entrance passages thus unclosed could be seen, as through tunnels, the mossy gardens at the back, glowing with nasturtiums, fuchsias, scarlet geraniums, “bloody warriors,” snapdragons, and dahlias, this floral blaze being backed