Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the stairs, called in a conventional voice-"Breakfast is ready!"
He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.
When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the sitting-room mechanically readjusting the breakfast things.
As she was fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he went to summon her.
Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks-a pale blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white.
Her hands and face appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long time without any fire.
The marked civility of Clare's tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a new glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him.
The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires.
To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.
He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like undemonstrativeness.
At last she came up to him, looking in his sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own formed a visible object also.
"Angel!" she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly as a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh the man who was once her lover.
Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as pale as her cheek.
Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly that a little further pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes, and make her mouth thin.
She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air.
"Tess!
Say it is not true!
No, it is not true!"
"It is true."
"Every word?"
"Every word."
He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort of sophistry, a valid denial.
However, she only repeated-"It is true."
"Is he living?"
Angel then asked.
"The baby died."
"But the man?"
"He is alive."
A last despair passed over Clare's face.
"Is he in England?"
"Yes."
He took a few vague steps.
"My position-is this," he said abruptly.
"I thought-any man would have thought-that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but-However, I am no man to reproach you, and I will not."
Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been needed.
Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost all round.
"Angel-I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had not known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though I hoped you would never-"
Her voice grew husky.
"A last way?"
"I mean, to get rid of me.
You CAN get rid of me."
"How?"
"By divorcing me."
"Good heavens-how can you be so simple!
How can I divorce you?"
"Can't you-now I have told you?
I thought my confession would give you grounds for that."
"O Tess-you are too, too-childish-unformed-crude, I suppose! I don't know what you are.
You don't understand the law-you don't understand!"
"What-you cannot?"