The charwoman soon came.
Her presence was at first a strain upon Tess, but afterwards an alleviation.
At half-past twelve she left her assistant alone in the kitchen, and, returning to the sitting-room, waited for the reappearance of Angel's form behind the bridge.
About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a quarter of a mile off.
She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner served by the time he should enter.
He went first to the room where they had washed their hands together the day before, and as he entered the sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the dishes as if by his own motion.
"How punctual!" he said.
"Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge," said she.
The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining conventual buildings-now a heap of ruins.
He left the house again in the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself through the evening with his papers.
She feared she was in the way and, when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she made herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour.
Clare's shape appeared at the door.
"You must not work like this," he said.
"You are not my servant; you are my wife."
She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat.
"I may think myself that-indeed?" she murmured, in piteous raillery.
"You mean in name!
Well, I don't want to be anything more."
"You MAY think so, Tess!
You are.
What do you mean?"
"I don't know," she said hastily, with tears in her accents.
"I thought I-because I am not respectable, I mean.
I told you I thought I was not respectable enough long ago-and on that account I didn't want to marry you, only-only you urged me!"
She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him.
It would almost have won round any man but Angel Clare.
Within the remote depths of his constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general, there lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam, which turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it.
It had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of Tess.
Moreover, his affection itself was less fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow: contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise.
He waited till her sobbing ceased.
"I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you," he said, in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general.
"It isn't a question of respectability, but one of principle!"
He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her, being still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls with such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by appearances.
There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him.
But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts, and hardly opened her mouth.
The firmness of her devotion to him was indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing that he could say made her unseemly; she sought not her own; was not provoked; thought no evil of his treatment of her.
She might just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world.
This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as the preceding ones had been passed.
On one, and only one, occasion did she-the formerly free and independent Tess-venture to make any advances.
It was on the third occasion of his starting after a meal to go out to the flour-mill.
As he was leaving the table he said
"Goodbye," and she replied in the same words, at the same time inclining her mouth in the way of his.
He did not avail himself of the invitation, saying, as he turned hastily aside-"I shall be home punctually."
Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck.
Often enough had he tried to reach those lips against her consent-often had he said gaily that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance from them, and other follies of that sort.
But he did not care for them now.
He observed her sudden shrinking, and said gently-"You know, I have to think of a course.
It was imperative that we should stay together a little while, to avoid the scandal to you that would have resulted from our immediate parting.
But you must see it is only for form's sake."
"Yes," said Tess absently.