`Of course.'

`You ought to be a happy wife.'

`And of course I am.'

`Bride, I might almost have said, as yet. It is not so many weeks since I gave you to him, and - - '

`Yes, I know! I know!' There was something in her face which belied her late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly spoken that they might have been taken from a list of model speeches in `The Wife's Guide to Conduct.' Jude knew the quality of every vibration in Sue's voice, could read every symptom of her mental condition; and he was convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a month married. But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last of a relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing; for Sue naturally did such things as those.

`Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson.'

She reproached him by a glance.

`No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson,' murmured Jude. `You are dear, free Sue Bridehead, only you don't know it! Wifedom has not yet squashed up and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no further individuality.'

Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, `Nor has husbandom you, so far as I can see!'

`But it has!' he said, shaking his head sadly.

When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A squalid family lived there now. He could not help saying to Sue: `That's the house my wife and I occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her home to that house.'

She looked at it. `That to you was what the school-house at Shaston is to me.'

`Yes; but I was not very happy there as you are in yours.'

She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way till she glanced at him to see how he was taking it. `Of course I may have exaggerated your happiness - one never knows,' he continued blandly.

`Don't think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said it to sting me! He's as good to me as a man can be, and gives me perfect liberty - which elderly husbands don't do in general.... If you think I am not happy because he's too old for me, you are wrong.'

`I don't think anything against him - to you dear.'

`And you won't say things to distress me, will you?'

`I will not.'

He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in taking Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she had done what she ought not to have done.

They plunged into the concave field on the other side of which rose the village - the field wherein Jude had received a thrashing from the farmer many years earlier. On ascending to the village and approaching the house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who at sight of them lifted her hands deprecatingly.