"No, never? Ha, ha! Good gad! I didn't expect it of you, Eustacia."

"It was my first performance, and it certainly will be my last. Now I
have told you--and remember it is a secret."

"Of course. But, Eustacia, you never did--ha! ha! Dammy, how 'twould
have pleased me forty years ago! But remember, no more of it, my girl.
You may walk on the heath night or day, as you choose, so that you don't
bother me; but no figuring in breeches again."

"You need have no fear for me, Grandpapa."

Here the conversation ceased, Eustacia's moral training never exceeding
in severity a dialogue of this sort, which, if it ever became profitable
to good works, would be a result not dear at the price. But her thoughts
soon strayed far from her own personality; and, full of a passionate and
indescribable solicitude for one to whom she was not even a name, she
went forth into the amplitude of tanned wild around her, restless as
Ahasuerus the Jew. She was about half a mile from her residence when
she beheld a sinister redness arising from a ravine a little way in
advance--dull and lurid like a flame in sunlight and she guessed it to
signify Diggory Venn.

When the farmers who had wished to buy in a new stock of reddle during
the last month had inquired where Venn was to be found, people replied,
"On Egdon Heath." Day after day the answer was the same. Now, since
Egdon was populated with heath-croppers and furze-cutters rather than
with sheep and shepherds, and the downs where most of the latter were
to be found lay some to the north, some to the west of Egdon, his
reason for camping about there like Israel in Zin was not apparent. The