At half-past eleven, finding that the house was silent, Eustacia had lighted her candle, put on some warm outer wrappings, taken her bag in her hand, and, extinguishing the light again, descended the staircase.  When she got into the outer air she found that it had begun to rain, and as she stood pausing at the door it increased, threatening to come on heavily.  But having committed herself to this line of action there was no retreating for bad weather.  Even the receipt of Clym’s letter would not have stopped her now.  The gloom of the night was funereal; all nature seemed clothed in crape.  The spiky points of the fir trees behind the house rose into the sky like the turrets and pinnacles of an abbey.  Nothing below the horizon was visible save a light which was still burning in the cottage of Susan Nunsuch.

Eustacia opened her umbrella and went out from the enclosure by the steps over the bank, after which she was beyond all danger of being perceived.  Skirting the pool, she followed the path towards Rainbarrow, occasionally stumbling over twisted furze-roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing lumps of fleshy fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal.  The moon and stars were closed up by cloud and rain to the degree of extinction.  It was a night which led the traveller’s thoughts instinctively to dwell on nocturnal scenes of disaster in the chronicles of the world, on all that is terrible and dark in history and legend—­the last plague of Egypt, the destruction of Sennacherib’s host, the agony in Gethsemane.

Eustacia at length reached Rainbarrow, and stood still there to think.  Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without.  A sudden recollection had flashed on her this moment:  she had not money enough for undertaking a long journey.  Amid the fluctuating sentiments of the day her unpractical mind had not dwelt on the necessity of being well-provided, and now that she thoroughly realized the condition she sighed bitterly and ceased to stand erect, gradually crouching down under the umbrella as if she were drawn into the Barrow by a hand from beneath.  Could it be that she was to remain a captive still?  Money:  she had never felt its value before.  Even to efface herself from the country means were required.  To ask Wildeve for pecuniary aid without allowing him to accompany her was impossible to a woman with a shadow of pride left in her; to fly as his mistress—­and she knew that he loved her—­was of the nature of humiliation.