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Gilbert looked surprised. "Hardy's daughter?" "Red" nodded. "How did you know?" Jones asked. "Because he ain't talked of nothin' else for six months. You wasn't thinkin' of doin' it, was you?" He hung on Gilbert's answer. "Hardly!" with a smile. The relief of "Red"! "I know, I know!" he cried. "But once she gets her mind set on a thing " "You mean you think she wants to marry me? Is that it?"

Hardy's best friend has infamously betrayed him. His adored mistress has abandoned him. The house which he had founded for the benefit of his workmen, whom he loved as brethren, is reduced to a heap of ashes. What then happens? All the springs of his soul are at once broken.

Thomas Hardy's work is too near Nature's heart to appeal to Mrs. Senter, and too clever for my good sister Emily, who will read no author, willingly, unless he calls a spade a pearl-headed hatpin. But Ellaline, strange to say, has been allowed to read him. It was an idea worthy of a "Mayor of Casterbridge."

"I did not know how long you might be before you returned to England, Miss Hardy, and as I knew how anxiously the answer to my message would be expected, I preferred to follow you, in order that there might be no more delay than necessary." Suddenly a thought flashed across Alice Hardy's brain. She advanced a step nearer to her visitor, and exclaimed "Do you come from my cousin Frank?"

The next time I go to one of those expensive shacks it will be just after I've had a hearty dinner. Even at that I may change my mind and go to a moving picture show. Hep Hardy's goat belongs to the chamois branch of that famous family. When it gets out it wants to leap from crag to crag. Hep's chamois got loose recently and, believe me, I never saw a goat perform to better advantage.

There was nothing in this, however, to make him sob. I repeat, therefore, that it must have been simply a freak of my own fancy, distempered by good Captain Hardy's green tea. Just before dawn, on each of the two nights of which I speak, I distinctly heard Mr. Wyatt replace the lid upon the oblong box, and force the nails into their old places by means of the muffled mallet.

Crompton of Crompton" was exceedingly gratifying to his vanity, and seemed in a way to lift the malarious cloud from him for a time at least. It was more than three years since Tom Hardy's letter had thrown him into a chill, and everything as yet was quiet.

Hardy's vision of the life of men and women transgresses similarly into a denial of gladness. His gloom, we feel, goes too far. It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as a factitious gloom.

The other came in a woman's utterance. It was Dorothy, at the open door. "Jerold!" she cried, and ran into the room and knelt where he lay on the floor. He was merely stunned. He recovered as if by the power of stubbornness, with his mind strangely occupied by thoughts of Hardy's will the hidden will and the fingers stained with black.

Loveit had strictly kept his promise of secrecy; but he was by no means an artful boy; and in talking to his friend, conscious that he had something to conceal, he was perpetually on the point of betraying himself; then recollecting his engagement, he blushed, stammered, bungled; and upon Hardy's asking what he meant, would answer with a silly, guilty countenance, that he did not know; or abruptly break off, saying, "Oh nothing! nothing at all!"