wood, to dry any dampness out of him. The noise of these attentions
she thought might awaken him, and secretly wished that they might.
But the exhaustion of his mind and body was such that he remained
undisturbed.
As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew
little or nothing of how far she had been concerned in the night's
excursion, though, as regarded himself, he may have been aware that
he had not lain still. In truth, he had awakened that morning from
a sleep deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments
in which the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its
strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding.
But the realities of his situation soon displaced conjecture on the
other subject.
He waited in expectancy to discern some mental pointing; he knew that
if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the
light of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure
reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so
far, therefore, to be trusted. He thus beheld in the pale morning
light the resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant
instinct, but denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch
and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the
less there. Clare no longer hesitated.
At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles,
he showed his weariness from the night's effort so unmistakeably that
Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the
reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know
that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his
common-sense did not approve, that his inclination had compromised
his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her. It was too much
like laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during
intoxication.
It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint
recollection of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to
it from a conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the
opportunity it gave her of appealing to him anew not to go.
He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and
soon after breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the beginning of
the end--the temporary end, at least, for the revelation of his
tenderness by the incident of the night raised dreams of a possible
future with him. The luggage was put on the top, and the man drove
them off, the miller and the old waiting-woman expressing some
surprise at their precipitate departure, which Clare attributed to
his discovery that the mill-work was not of the modern kind which he
wished to investigate, a statement that was true so far as it went.
Beyond this there was nothing in the manner of their leaving to
suggest a fiasco, or that they were not going together to visit
friends.
Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such
solemn joy in each other a few days back, and as Clare wished to wind
up his business with Mr Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs
