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 on this account that your father rode home in the carriage; not because he’d been drinking, as people supposed.’

‘I’m glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?’

‘Oh yes! ’Tis thoughted that great things may come o’t. No doubt a mampus of folk of our own rank will be down here in their carriages as soon as ’tis known. Your father learnt it on his way home from Stourcastle, and has been telling me the whole pedigree of the matter.’

‘Where is father now?’ asked Tess suddenly.

Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer.

‘He called to see the doctor to-day in Stourcastle. It is not consumption at all, it seems. It is fat round his heart, he says. There, it is like this.’ Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb and forefinger to the shape of the letter C, and used the other forefinger as a pointer. At the present moment,” he says to your father, “your heart is enclosed all round there, and all round there; this space is still open,” he says, “As soon as it meets, so,—Mrs. Durbeyfield closed her fingers into a circle