was loosely wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white,
embroidered in half-mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same
hue. Her neck rose out of a frill of down, and her well-remembered
cable of dark-brown hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the
back of her head and partly hanging on her shoulder--the evident
result of haste.
He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side;
for she had not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the
doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was now, he felt the contrast
between them, and thought his appearance distasteful to her.
'Tess!' he said huskily, 'can you forgive me for going away? Can't
you--come to me? How do you get to be--like this?'
'It is too late,' said she, her voice sounding hard through the room,
her eyes shining unnaturally.
'I did not think rightly of you--I did not see you as you were!' he
continued to plead. 'I have learnt to since, dearest Tessy mine!'
'Too late, too late!' she said, waving her hand in the impatience of
a person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. 'Don't
come close to me, Angel! No--you must not. Keep away.'
'But don't you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled
down by illness? You are not so fickle--I am come on purpose for
you--my mother and father will welcome you now!'
'Yes--O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late.'
She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move
away, but cannot. 'Don't you know all--don't you know it? Yet how
do you come here if you do not know?'
'I inquired here and there, and I found the way.'
'I waited and waited for you,' she went on, her tones suddenly
resuming their old fluty pathos. 'But you did not come! And I wrote
to you, and you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come
any more, and that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me,
and to mother, and to all of us after father's death. He--'
'I don't understand.'
'He has won me back to him.'
Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged
like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands,
which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate.
She continued--
'He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie--that you
would not come again; and you HAVE come! These clothes are what he's
put upon me: I didn't care what he did wi' me! But--will you go
away, Angel, please, and never come any more?'
They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with
a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to
shelter them from reality.
'Ah--it is my fault!' said Clare.
But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But
he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear
to him till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to
recognize the body before him as hers--allowing it to drift, like a
