Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/66

 again to the New Testament by half-past five. It was nine o'clock when, with another embrace, he stood to deliver her up at her father's door.

She asked him to come in, if only for a minute, as it would seem so odd otherwise, and as if she had been out alone in the dark. He gave way, and followed her in. Immediately that the door was opened he found, in addition to her parents, several neighbors sitting round. They all spoke in a congratulatory manner, and took him seriously as Arabella's intended partner.

They did not belong to his set or circle, and he felt out of place and embarrassed. He had not meant this: a mere afternoon of pleasant walking with Arabella, that was all he had meant. He did not stay longer than to speak to her step-mother, a simple, quiet woman, without features or character; and bidding them all good-night, plunged with a sense of relief into the track over the down.

But that sense was only temporary. Arabella soon reasserted her sway in his soul. He walked as if he felt himself to be another man from the Jude of yesterday. What were his books to him? what were his intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a single minute of time day by day? "Wasting!" It depended on your point of view to define that he was just living for the first time; not wasting life. It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson—ay, or a pope!

When he got back to the house, his aunt had gone to bed, and a general consciousness of his neglect seemed written on the face of all things confronting him. He went up-stairs without a light, and the dim interior of his room accosted him with sad inquiry. There lay his book open, just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the title-page regarded him with fixed reproach in the gray starlight, like the unclosed eyes of a dead man:

H KΑΙNH ΔІАӨНΚН.