Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/457

 with him any longer. I only heard of it as a certainty just before I left; though I had thought things were drifting that way from their manner when I called on them."

"Not live with her husband? Why, I should have thought 'twould have united them more."

"He's not her husband, after all. She has never really married him, although they have passed as man and wife so long. And now, instead of this sad event making 'em hurry up and get the thing done legally, she's took in a queer religious way, just as I was in my affliction at losing Cartlett, only hers is of a more 'sterical sort than mine. And she says, so I was told, that she's your wife in the eye of Heaven and the Church. Yours only, and can't be anybody else's by any act of man."

"Ah—indeed!... Separated, have they?"

"You see, the eldest boy was mine—"

"Oh—yours!"

"Yes, poor little fellow—born in lawful wedlock, thank God! And perhaps she feels, over and above other things, that I ought to have been in her place. I can't say. However, as for me, I am soon off from here. I've got father to look after now, and we can't live in such a humdrum place as this. I hope soon to be in a bar again at Christminster, or some other big town."

They parted. When Phillotson had ascended the hill a few steps he stopped, hastened back, and called her.

"What is, or was, their address?"

Arabella gave it.

"Thank you. Good-afternoon."

Arabella smiled grimly as she resumed her way, and practised dimple-making all along the road, from where the pollard willows begin to the old almshouses in the first street of the town.

Meanwhile Phillotson ascended to Marygreen, and for the first time during a lengthened period he lived with a forward eye. On crossing under the large trees of the