Chapter: Jude wondered if she had really left her handkerchief behind; or
whether it were that she had miserably wished to tell him of a love
that at the last moment she could not bring herself to express.

He could not stay in his silent lodging when they were gone, and
fearing that he might be tempted to drown his misery in alcohol he
went upstairs, changed his dark clothes for his white, his thin boots
for his thick, and proceeded to his customary work for the afternoon.

But in the cathedral he seemed to hear a voice behind him, and to
be possessed with an idea that she would come back.  She could not
possibly go home with Phillotson, he fancied.  The feeling grew and
stirred.  The moment that the clock struck the last of his working
hours he threw down his tools and rushed homeward.  "Has anybody been
for me?" he asked.

Nobody had been there.

As he could claim the downstairs sitting-room till twelve o'clock
that night he sat in it all the evening; and even when the clock had
struck eleven, and the family had retired, he could not shake off
the feeling that she would come back and sleep in the little room
adjoining his own in which she had slept so many previous days.  Her
actions were always unpredictable: why should she not come?  Gladly
would he have compounded for the denial of her as a sweetheart and
wife by having her live thus as a fellow-lodger and friend, even on
the most distant terms.  His supper still remained spread, and going
to the front door, and softly setting it open, he returned to the
room and sat as watchers sit on Old-Midsummer eves, expecting the
phantom of the Beloved.  But she did not come.

Having indulged in this wild hope he went upstairs, and looked out of
the window, and pictured her through the evening journey to London,
whither she and Phillotson had gone for their holiday; their rattling
along through the damp night to their hotel, under the same sky of
ribbed cloud as that he beheld, through which the moon showed its
position rather than its shape, and one or two of the larger stars
made themselves visible as faint nebulae only.  It was a new
beginning of Sue's history.  He projected his mind into the future,
and saw her with children more or less in her own likeness around
her.  But the consolation of regarding them as a continuation of
her identity was denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the
wilfulness of Nature in not allowing issue from one parent alone.
Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.
"If at the estrangement or death of my lost love, I could go and see
her child--hers solely--there would be comfort in it!" said Jude.
And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and
more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man's finer emotions, and her
lack of interest in his aspirations.

The oppressive strength of his affection for Sue showed itself on
the morrow and following days yet more clearly.  He could no longer
endure the light of the Melchester lamps; the sunshine was as drab
paint, and the blue sky as zinc.  Then he received news that his old
aunt was dangerously ill at Marygreen, which intelligence almost
coincided with a letter from his former employer at Christminster,
who offered him permanent work of a good class if he would come back.
The letters were almost a relief to him.  He started to visit Aunt
Drusilla, and resolved to go onward to Christminster to see what
worth there might be in the builder's offer.

Jude found his aunt even worse than the communication from the Widow
Edlin had led him to expect.  There was every possibility of her
lingering on for weeks or months, though little likelihood.  He wrote
to Sue informing her of the state of her aunt, and suggesting that
she might like to see her aged relative alive.  He would meet her at
Alfredston Road, the following evening, Monday, on his way back from
Christminster, if she could come by the up-train which crossed his
down-train at that station.  Next morning, according, he went on to
Christminster, intending to return to Alfredston soon enough to keep
the suggested appointment with Sue.

The city of learning wore an estranged look, and he had lost all
feeling for its associations.  Yet as the sun made vivid lights
and shades of the mullioned architecture of the facades, and drew
patterns of the crinkled battlements on the young turf of the
quadrangles, Jude thought he had never seen the place look more
beautiful.  He came to the street in which he had first beheld Sue.
The chair she had occupied when, leaning over her ecclesiastical
scrolls, a hog-hair brush in her hand, her girlish figure had
arrested the gaze of his inquiring eyes, stood precisely in its
former spot, empty.  It was as if she were dead, and nobody had been
found capable of succeeding her in that artistic pursuit.  Hers was
now the city phantom, while those of the intellectual and devotional
worthies who had once moved him to emotion were no longer able to
assert their presence there.

However, here he was; and in fulfilment of his intention he went on
to his former lodging in "Beersheba," near the ritualistic church of
St. Silas.  The old landlady who opened the door seemed glad to see
him again, and bringing some lunch informed him that the builder who
had employed him had called to inquire his address.

Jude went on to the stone-yard where he had worked.  But the old
sheds and bankers were distasteful to him; he felt it impossible to
engage himself to return and stay in this place of vanished dreams.
He longed for the hour of the homeward train to Alfredston, where he
might probably meet Sue.

Then, for one ghastly half-hour of depression caused by these scenes,
there returned upon him that feeling which had been his undoing more
than once--that he was not worth the trouble of being taken care of
either by himself or others; and during this half-hour he met Tinker
Taylor, the bankrupt ecclesiastical ironmonger, at Fourways, who
proposed that they should adjourn to a bar and drink together.
They walked along the street till they stood before one of the
great palpitating centres of Christminster life, the inn wherein he
formerly had responded to the challenge to rehearse the Creed in
Latin--now a popular tavern with a spacious and inviting entrance,
which gave admittance to a bar that had been entirely renovated and
refitted in modern style since Jude's residence here.

Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed, saying it was too
stylish a place now for him to feel at home in unless he was drunker
than he had money to be just then.  Jude was longer finishing his,
and stood abstractedly silent in the, for the minute, almost empty
place.  The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout,
mahogany fixtures having taken the place of the old painted
ones, while at the back of the standing-space there were stuffed
sofa-benches.  The room was divided into compartments in the approved
manner, between which were screens of ground glass in mahogany
framing, to prevent topers in one compartment being put to the blush
by the recognitions of those in the next.  On the inside of the
counter two barmaids leant over the white-handled beer-engines,
and the row of little silvered taps inside, dripping into a pewter
trough.

Feeling tired, and having nothing more to do till the train left,
Jude sat down on one of the sofas.  At the back of the barmaids rose
bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along their front,
on which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name
of, in bottles of topaz, sapphire, ruby and amethyst.  The moment
was enlivened by the entrance of some customers into the next
compartment, and the starting of the mechanical tell-tale of monies
received, which emitted a ting-ting every time a coin was put in.

The barmaid attending to this compartment was invisible to Jude's
direct glance, though a reflection of her back in the glass behind
her was occasionally caught by his eyes.  He had only observed this
listlessly, when she turned her face for a moment to the glass to set
her hair tidy.  Then he was amazed to discover that the face was
Arabella's.

If she had come on to his compartment she would have seen him.
But she did not, this being presided over by the maiden on the other
side.  Abby was in a black gown, with white linen cuffs and a broad
white collar, and her figure, more developed than formerly, was
accentuated by a bunch of daffodils that she wore on her left bosom.
In the compartment she served stood an electro-plated fountain of
water over a spirit-lamp, whose blue flame sent a steam from the top,
all this being visible to him only in the mirror behind her; which
also reflected the faces of the men she was attending to--one of them
a handsome, dissipated young fellow, possibly an undergraduate, who
had been relating to her an experience of some humorous sort.

"Oh, Mr. Cockman, now!  How can you tell such a tale to me in my
innocence!" she cried gaily.  "Mr. Cockman, what do you use to make
your moustache curl so beautiful?"  As the young man was clean shaven,
the retort provoked a laugh at his expense.

"Come!" said he, "I'll have a curacao; and a light, please."

She served the liqueur from one of the lovely bottles and striking
a match held it to his cigarette with ministering archness while he
whiffed.

"Well, have you heard from your husband lately, my dear?" he asked.

"Not a sound," said she.

"Where is he?"

"I left him in Australia; and I suppose he's there still."

Jude's eyes grew rounder.

"What made you part from him?"

"Don't you ask questions, and you won't hear lies."

"Come then, give me my change, which you've been keeping from me for
the last quarter of an hour; and I'll romantically vanish up the
street of this picturesque city."

She handed the change over the counter, in taking which he caught her
fingers and held them.  There was a slight struggle and titter, and
he bade her good-bye and left.

Jude had looked on with the eye of a dazed philosopher.  It was
extraordinary how far removed from his life Arabella now seemed to
be.  He could not realize their nominal closeness.  And, this being
the case, in his present frame of mind he was indifferent to the fact
that Arabella was his wife indeed.

The compartment that she served emptied itself of visitors, and
after a brief thought he entered it, and went forward to the counter.
Arabella did not recognize him for a moment.  Then their glances met.
She started; till a humorous impudence sparkled in her eyes, and she
spoke.

"Well, I'm blest!  I thought you were underground years ago!"

"Oh!"

"I never heard anything of you, or I don't know that I should
have come here.  But never mind!  What shall I treat you to this
afternoon?  A Scotch and soda?  Come, anything that the house will
afford, for old acquaintance' sake!"

"Thanks, Arabella," said Jude without a smile.  "But I don't want
anything more than I've had."  The fact was that her unexpected
presence there had destroyed at a stroke his momentary taste for
strong liquor as completely as if it had whisked him back to his
milk-fed infancy.

"That's a pity, now you could get it for nothing."

"How long have you been here?"

"About six weeks.  I returned from Sydney three months ago.  I always
liked this business, you know."

"I wonder you came to this place!"

"Well, as I say, I thought you were gone to glory, and being in
London I saw the situation in an advertisement.  Nobody was likely to
know me here, even if I had minded, for I was never in Christminster
in my growing up."

"Why did you return from Australia?"

"Oh, I had my reasons...  Then you are not a don yet?"

"No."

"Not even a reverend?"

"No."

"Nor so much as a rather reverend dissenting gentleman?"

"I am as I was."

"True--you look so."  She idly allowed her fingers to rest on the
pull of the beer-engine as she inspected him critically.  He observed
that her hands were smaller and whiter than when he had lived with
her, and that on the hand which pulled the engine she wore an
ornamental ring set with what seemed to be real sapphires--which they
were, indeed, and were much admired as such by the young men who
frequented the bar.

"So you pass as having a living husband," he continued.

"Yes.  I thought it might be awkward if I called myself a widow, as I
should have liked."

"True.  I am known here a little."

"I didn't mean on that account--for as I said I didn't expect you.
It was for other reasons."

"What were they?"

"I don't care to go into them," she replied evasively.  "I make a
very good living, and I don't know that I want your company."

Here a chappie with no chin, and a moustache like a lady's eyebrow,
came and asked for a curiously compounded drink, and Arabella was
obliged to go and attend to him.  "We can't talk here," she said,
stepping back a moment.  "Can't you wait till nine?  Say yes, and
don't be a fool.  I can get off duty two hours sooner than usual, if
I ask.  I am not living in the house at present."

He reflected and said gloomily, "I'll come back.  I suppose we'd
better arrange something."

"Oh, bother arranging!  I'm not going to arrange anything!"

"But I must know a thing or two; and, as you say, we can't talk here.
Very well; I'll call for you."

Depositing his unemptied glass he went out and walked up and down the
street.  Here was a rude flounce into the pellucid sentimentality of
his sad attachment to Sue.  Though Arabella's word was absolutely
untrustworthy, he thought there might be some truth in her
implication that she had not wished to disturb him, and had really
supposed him dead.  However, there was only one thing now to be done,
and that was to play a straightforward part, the law being the law,
and the woman between whom and himself there was no more unity than
between east and west, being in the eye of the Church one person with
him.

Having to meet Arabella here, it was impossible to meet Sue at
Alfredston as he had promised.  At every thought of this a pang
had gone through him; but the conjuncture could not be helped.
Arabella was perhaps an intended intervention to punish him for his
unauthorized love.  Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory
waiting about the town wherein he avoided the precincts of every
cloister and hall, because he could not bear to behold them, he
repaired to the tavern bar while the hundred and one strokes were
resounding from the Great Bell of Cardinal College, a coincidence
which seemed to him gratuitous irony.  The inn was now brilliantly
lighted up, and the scene was altogether more brisk and gay.  The
faces of the barmaidens had risen in colour, each having a pink
flush on her cheek; their manners were still more vivacious than
before--more abandoned, more excited, more sensuous, and they
expressed their sentiments and desires less euphemistically, laughing
in a lackadaisical tone, without reserve.

The bar had been crowded with men of all sorts during the previous
hour, and he had heard from without the hubbub of their voices; but
the customers were fewer at last.  He nodded to Arabella, and told
her that she would find him outside the door when she came away.

"But you must have something with me first," she said with great
good humour.  "Just an early night-cap: I always do.  Then you can
go out and wait a minute, as it is best we should not be seen going
together."  She drew a couple of liqueur glasses of brandy; and
though she had evidently, from her countenance, already taken in
enough alcohol either by drinking or, more probably, from the
atmosphere she had breathed for so many hours, she finished hers
quickly.  He also drank his, and went outside the house.

In a few minutes she came, in a thick jacket and a hat with a black
feather.  "I live quite near," she said, taking his arm, "and can let
myself in by a latch-key at any time.  What arrangement do you want
to come to?"

"Oh--none in particular," he answered, thoroughly sick and tired, his
thoughts again reverting to Alfredston, and the train he did not go
by; the probable disappointment of Sue that he was not there when
she arrived, and the missed pleasure of her company on the long and
lonely climb by starlight up the hills to Marygreen.  "I ought to
have gone back really!  My aunt is on her deathbed, I fear."

"I'll go over with you to-morrow morning.  I think I could get a day
off."

There was something particularly uncongenial in the idea of Arabella,
who had no more sympathy than a tigress with his relations or him,
coming to the bedside of his dying aunt, and meeting Sue.  Yet he
said, "Of course, if you'd like to, you can."

"Well, that we'll consider...  Now, until we have come to some
agreement it is awkward our being together here--where you are known,
and I am getting known, though without any suspicion that I have
anything to do with you.  As we are going towards the station,
suppose we take the nine-forty train to Aldbrickham?  We shall be
there in little more than half an hour, and nobody will know us for
one night, and we shall be quite free to act as we choose till we
have made up our minds whether we'll make anything public or not."

"As you like."

"Then wait till I get two or three things.  This is my lodging.
Sometimes when late I sleep at the hotel where I am engaged, so
nobody will think anything of my staying out."

She speedily returned, and they went on to the railway, and made the
half-hour's journey to Aldbrickham, where they entered a third-rate
inn near the station in time for a late supper.




On the morrow between nine and half-past they were journeying back
to Christminster, the only two occupants of a compartment in a
third-class railway-carriage.  Having, like Jude, made rather a
hasty toilet to catch the train, Arabella looked a little frowsy,
and her face was very far from possessing the animation which had
characterized it at the bar the night before.  When they came out of
the station she found that she still had half an hour to spare before
she was due at the bar.  They walked in silence a little way out of
the town in the direction of Alfredston.  Jude looked up the far
highway.

"Ah ... poor feeble me!" he murmured at last.

"What?" said she.

"This is the very road by which I came into Christminster years ago
full of plans!"

"Well, whatever the road is I think my time is nearly up, as I have
to be in the bar by eleven o'clock.  And as I said, I shan't ask for
the day to go with you to see your aunt.  So perhaps we had better
part here.  I'd sooner not walk up Chief Street with you, since we've
come to no conclusion at all."

"Very well.  But you said when we were getting up this morning that
you had something you wished to tell me before I left?"

"So I had--two things--one in particular.  But you wouldn't promise
to keep it a secret.  I'll tell you now if you promise?  As an honest
woman I wish you to know it...  It was what I began telling you
in the night--about that gentleman who managed the Sydney hotel."
Arabella spoke somewhat hurriedly for her.  "You'll keep it close?"

"Yes--yes--I promise!" said Jude impatiently.  "Of course I don't
want to reveal your secrets."

"Whenever I met him out for a walk, he used to say that he was much
taken with my looks, and he kept pressing me to marry him.  I never
thought of coming back to England again; and being out there in
Australia, with no home of my own after leaving my father, I at last
agreed, and did."

"What--marry him?"

"Yes."

"Regularly--legally--in church?"

"Yes.  And lived with him till shortly before I left.  It was stupid,
I know; but I did!  There, now I've told you.  Don't round upon me!
He talks of coming back to England, poor old chap.  But if he does,
he won't be likely to find me."

Jude stood pale and fixed.

"Why the devil didn't you tell me last, night!" he said.

"Well--I didn't...  Won't you make it up with me, then?"

"So in talking of 'your husband' to the bar gentlemen you meant him,
of course--not me!"

"Of course...  Come, don't fuss about it."

"I have nothing more to say!" replied Jude.  "I have nothing at all
to say about the--crime--you've confessed to!"

"Crime!  Pooh.  They don't think much of such as that over there!
Lots of 'em do it...  Well, if you take it like that I shall go back
to him!  He was very fond of me, and we lived honourable enough, and
as respectable as any married couple in the colony!  How did I know
where you were?"

"I won't go blaming you.  I could say a good deal; but perhaps it
would be misplaced.  What do you wish me to do?"

"Nothing.  There was one thing more I wanted to tell you; but I fancy
we've seen enough of one another for the present!  I shall think over
what you said about your circumstances, and let you know."

Thus they parted.  Jude watched her disappear in the direction of
the hotel, and entered the railway station close by.  Finding that
it wanted three-quarters of an hour of the time at which he could
get a train back to Alfredston, he strolled mechanically into the
city as far as to the Fourways, where he stood as he had so often
stood before, and surveyed Chief Street stretching ahead, with its
college after college, in picturesqueness unrivalled except by such
Continental vistas as the Street of Palaces in Genoa; the lines
of the buildings being as distinct in the morning air as in an
architectural drawing.  But Jude was far from seeing or criticizing
these things; they were hidden by an indescribable consciousness of
Arabella's midnight contiguity, a sense of degradation at his revived
experiences with her, of her appearance as she lay asleep at dawn,
which set upon his motionless face a look as of one accurst.  If he
could only have felt resentment towards her he would have been less
unhappy; but he pitied while he contemned her.

Jude turned and retraced his steps.  Drawing again towards the
station he started at hearing his name pronounced--less at the name
than at the voice.  To his great surprise no other than Sue stood
like a vision before him--her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream,
her little mouth nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful
inquiry.

"Oh, Jude--I am so glad--to meet you like this!" she said in quick,
uneven accents not far from a sob.  Then she flushed as she observed
his thought that they had not met since her marriage.

They looked away from each other to hide their emotion, took each
other's hand without further speech, and went on together awhile,
till she glanced at him with furtive solicitude.  "I arrived at
Alfredston station last night, as you asked me to, and there was
nobody to meet me!  But I reached Marygreen alone, and they told me
Aunt was a trifle better.  I sat up with her, and as you did not come
all night I was frightened about you--I thought that perhaps, when
you found yourself back in the old city, you were upset at--at
thinking I was--married, and not there as I used to be; and that you
had nobody to speak to; so you had tried to drown your gloom--as you
did at that former time when you were disappointed about entering as
a student, and had forgotten your promise to me that you never would
again.  And this, I thought, was why you hadn't come to meet me!"

"And you came to hunt me up, and deliver me, like a good angel!"

"I thought I would come by the morning train and try to find you--in
case--in case--"

"I did think of my promise to you, dear, continually!  I shall never
break out again as I did, I am sure.  I may have been doing nothing
better, but I was not doing that--I loathe the thought of it."

"I am glad your staying had nothing to do with that.  But," she said,
the faintest pout entering into her tone, "you didn't come back last
night and meet me, as you engaged to!"

"I didn't--I am sorry to say.  I had an appointment at nine
o'clock--too late for me to catch the train that would have met
yours, or to get home at all."

Looking at his loved one as she appeared to him now, in his tender
thought the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever
had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature
that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs, he felt
heartily ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had
spent in Arabella's company.  There was something rude and immoral
in thrusting these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who,
to him, was so uncarnate as to seem at times impossible as a human
wife to any average man.  And yet she was Phillotson's.  How she had
become such, how she lived as such, passed his comprehension as he
regarded her to-day.

"You'll go back with me?" he said.  "There's a train just now.  I
wonder how my aunt is by this time...  And so, Sue, you really came
on my account all this way!  At what an early time you must have
started, poor thing!"

"Yes.  Sitting up watching alone made me all nerves for you, and
instead of going to bed when it got light I started.  And now you
won't frighten me like this again about your morals for nothing?"

He was not so sure that she had been frightened about his morals for
nothing.  He released her hand till they had entered the train,--it
seemed the same carriage he had lately got out of with another--where
they sat down side by side, Sue between him and the window.  He
regarded the delicate lines of her profile, and the small, tight,
applelike convexities of her bodice, so different from Arabella's
amplitudes.  Though she knew he was looking at her she did not turn
to him, but kept her eyes forward, as if afraid that by meeting his
own some troublous discussion would be initiated.

"Sue--you are married now, you know, like me; and yet we have been in
such a hurry that we have not said a word about it!"

"There's no necessity," she quickly returned.

"Oh well--perhaps not...  But I wish"

"Jude--don't talk about ME--I wish you wouldn't!" she entreated.
"It distresses me, rather.  Forgive my saying it! ...  Where did you
stay last night?"

She had asked the question in perfect innocence, to change the topic.
He knew that, and said merely, "At an inn," though it would have been
a relief to tell her of his meeting with an unexpected one.  But the
latter's final announcement of her marriage in Australia bewildered
him lest what he might say should do his ignorant wife an injury.

Their talk proceeded but awkwardly till they reached Alfredston.
That Sue was not as she had been, but was labelled "Phillotson,"
paralyzed Jude whenever he wanted to commune with her as an
individual.  Yet she seemed unaltered--he could not say why.
There remained the five-mile extra journey into the country, which
it was just as easy to walk as to drive, the greater part of it being
uphill.  Jude had never before in his life gone that road with Sue,
though he had with another.  It was now as if he carried a bright
light which temporarily banished the shady associations of the
earlier time.

Sue talked; but Jude noticed that she still kept the conversation
from herself.  At length he inquired if her husband were well.

"O yes," she said.  "He is obliged to be in the school all the day,
or he would have come with me.  He is so good and kind that to
accompany me he would have dismissed the school for once, even
against his principles--for he is strongly opposed to giving casual
holidays--only I wouldn't let him.  I felt it would be better to come
alone.  Aunt Drusilla, I knew, was so very eccentric; and his being
almost a stranger to her now would have made it irksome to both.
Since it turns out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not
ask him."

Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson was being
expressed.  "Mr. Phillotson obliges you in everything, as he ought,"
he said.

"Of course."

"You ought to be a happy wife."

"And of course I am."

"Bride, I might almost have said, as yet.  It is not so many weeks
since I gave you to him, and--"

"Yes, I know!  I know!"  There was something in her face which belied
her late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly spoken
that they might have been taken from a list of model speeches in "The
Wife's Guide to Conduct."  Jude knew the quality of every vibration
in Sue's voice, could read every symptom of her mental condition; and
he was convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a
month married.  But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last
of a relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing;
for Sue naturally did such things as those.

"Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson."

She reproached him by a glance.

"No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson," murmured Jude.  "You are dear,
free Sue Bridehead, only you don't know it!  Wifedom has not yet
squashed up and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no
further individuality."

Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, "Nor has
husbandom you, so far as I can see!"

"But it has!" he said, shaking his head sadly.

When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the
Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and
quarrelled, he turned to look at it.  A squalid family lived there
now.  He could not help saying to Sue: "That's the house my wife and
I occupied the whole of the time we lived together.  I brought her
home to that house."

She looked at it.  "That to you was what the school-house at Shaston
is to me."

"Yes; but I was not very happy there as you are in yours."

She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way
till she glanced at him to see how he was taking it.  "Of course I
may have exaggerated your happiness--one never knows," he continued
blandly.

"Don't think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said
it to sting me!  He's as good to me as a man can be, and gives me
perfect liberty--which elderly husbands don't do in general...  If
you think I am not happy because he's too old for me, you are wrong."

"I don't think anything against him--to you dear."

"And you won't say things to distress me, will you?"

"I will not."

He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in
taking Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she had done what she
ought not to have done.

They plunged into the concave field on the other side of which rose
the village--the field wherein Jude had received a thrashing from
the farmer many years earlier.  On ascending to the village and
approaching the house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who
at sight of them lifted her hands deprecatingly.  "She's downstairs,
if you'll believe me!" cried the widow.  "Out o' bed she got, and
nothing could turn her.  What will come o't I do not know!"

On entering, there indeed by the fireplace sat the old woman, wrapped
in blankets, and turning upon them a countenance like that of
Sebastiano's Lazarus.  They must have looked their amazement, for she
said in a hollow voice:

"Ah--sceered ye, have I!  I wasn't going to bide up there no longer,
to please nobody!  'Tis more than flesh and blood can bear, to be
ordered to do this and that by a feller that don't know half as well
as you do yourself! ...  Ah--you'll rue this marrying as well as
he!" she added, turning to Sue.  "All our family do--and nearly all
everybody else's.  You should have done as I did, you simpleton!  And
Phillotson the schoolmaster, of all men!  What made 'ee marry him?"

"What makes most women marry, Aunt?"

"Ah!  You mean to say you loved the man!"

"I don't meant to say anything definite."

"Do ye love un?"

"Don't ask me, Aunt."

"I can mind the man very well.  A very civil, honourable liver; but
Lord!--I don't want to wownd your feelings, but--there be certain men
here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach.  I should
have said he was one.  I don't say so NOW, since you must ha' known
better than I--but that's what I SHOULD have said!"

Sue jumped up and went out.  Jude followed her, and found her in the
outhouse, crying.

"Don't cry, dear!" said Jude in distress.  "She means well, but is
very crusty and queer now, you know."

"Oh no--it isn't that!" said Sue, trying to dry her eyes.  "I don't
mind her roughness one bit."

"What is it, then?"

"It is that what she says is--is true!"

"God--what--you don't like him?" asked Jude.

"I don't mean that!" she said hastily.  "That I ought--perhaps I
ought not to have married!"

He wondered if she had really been going to say that at first.
They went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took
rather kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly
married would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her.
In the afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to
drive her to Alfredston.

"I'll go with you to the station, if you'd like?" he said.

She would not let him.  The man came round with the trap, and Jude
helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she
looked at him prohibitively.

"I suppose--I may come to see you some day, when I am back again at
Melchester?" he half-crossly observed.

She bent down and said softly: "No, dear--you are not to come yet.
I don't think you are in a good mood."

"Very well," said Jude.  "Good-bye!"

"Good-bye!" She waved her hand and was gone.

"She's right!  I won't go!" he murmured.

He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every
possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in
attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love
her.  He read sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church
history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century.  Before
he had returned from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter
from Arabella.  The sight of it revived a stronger feeling of
self-condemnation for his brief return to her society than for his
attachment to Sue.

The letter, he perceived, bore a London postmark instead of the
Christminster one.  Arabella informed him that a few days after their
parting in the morning at Christminster, she had been surprised by an
affectionate letter from her Australian husband, formerly manager of
the hotel in Sydney.  He had come to England on purpose to find her;
and had taken a free, fully-licensed public, in Lambeth, where he
wished her to join him in conducting the business, which was likely
to be a very thriving one, the house being situated in an excellent,
densely populated, gin-drinking neighbourhood, and already doing a
trade of L200 a month, which could be easily doubled.

As he had said that he loved her very much still, and implored her to
tell him where she was, and as they had only parted in a slight tiff,
and as her engagement in Christminster was only temporary, she had
just gone to join him as he urged.  She could not help feeling that
she belonged to him more than to Jude, since she had properly married
him, and had lived with him much longer than with her first husband.
In thus wishing Jude good-bye she bore him no ill-will, and trusted
he would not turn upon her, a weak woman, and inform against her,
and bring her to ruin now that she had a chance of improving her
circumstances and leading a genteel life.

 With Sue gone, Jude finds Melchester oppressive. News that his aunt is ill and an offer from his former employer at Christminster give him excuse to leave. Finding his aunt very ill indeed, he writes to Sue, suggesting she come and offering to meet her on his way back from Christminster. He finds it a city of ghosts and decides not to return there, but before leaving to meet Sue he goes into a tavern, the one where he recited the Creed, for a drink to relieve his depressed feelings. There he encounters Arabella, back from Australia, working as a barmaid. He agrees to meet her later, though it means missing the train and his meeting with Sue. When Jude has no ideas as to arrangements for their separation, at Arabella's suggestion they go to Aldbrickham and spend the night, giving themselves time, according to her, to decide what to do. Back in Christminster the next day, Arabella tells Jude she married again in Australia and when he is angry about this says she will go back to the other man if Jude won't have her. No sooner has he left Arabella than he encounters Sue, who has come to look for him, thinking he may have started drinking as the result of being in the city where so many of his hopes have been disappointed. They return to Marygreen together, and Jude tries unsuccessfully to find out about her marriage, convinced she is unhappy. But she will say nothing but good of Phillotson, and she is offended, later, when Aunt Drusilla makes derogatory remarks about marriage and about Phillotson as a husband. Out of her hearing, Sue admits to Jude she may have made a mistake but will not discuss the subject further. In the days after her departure Jude tries to discipline himself not to think of his love for her. While still at Marygreen, Jude gets a letter from Arabella announcing that she is joining her second husband in London and will help him run a tavern.

