Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/328

 a kindness to her, since then she could marry and live respectably. And Jude has agreed."

"A wife.... A kindness to her. Ah, yes; a kindness to her to release her altogether.... But I don't like the sound of it. I can forgive, Sue!"

"No, no! You can't have me back, now I have been so wicked—as to do what I have done!"

There had arisen in Sue's face that incipient fright which showed itself whenever he changed from friend to husband, and which made her adopt any line of defence against marital feeling in him. "I must go now. I'll come again—may I?"

"I don't ask you to go, even now. I ask you to stay."

"I thank you, Richard, but I must. As you are not so ill as I thought, I cannot stay!"

"She's his—his from lips to heel!" said Phillotson, but so faintly that in closing the door she did not hear it. The dread of a reactionary change in the school-master's sentiments, coupled perhaps with a faint shamefacedness at letting even him know what a slipshod lack of thoroughness, from a man's point of view, characterized her transferred allegiance, prevented her telling him of her, thus far, incomplete relations with Jude; and Phillotson lay writhing like a man in hell as he pictured the prettily dressed, maddening compound of sympathy and averseness who bore his name, returning impatiently to the home of her lover.

Gillingham was so interested in Phillotson's affairs, and so seriously concerned about him, that he walked up the hill-side to Shaston two or three times a week, although, there and back, it was a journey of nine miles, which had to be performed between tea and supper, after a hard day's work in school. When he called on the next occasion after Sue's visit his friend was down-stairs, and Gillingham noticed that his restless mood had been supplanted by a more fixed and composed one.