voice being ever so little shaken. He was plainly under that strange
influence which sometimes prompts men to confide to the new-found
friend what they will not tell to the old. "I began life as a working
hay-trusser, and when I was eighteen I married on the strength o' my
calling. Would you think me a married man?"

"I heard in the town that you were a widower."

"Ah, yes--you would naturally have heard that. Well, I lost my wife
nineteen years ago or so--by my own fault....This is how it came about.
One summer evening I was travelling for employment, and she was walking
at my side, carrying the baby, our only child. We came to a booth in a
country fair. I was a drinking man at that time."

Henchard paused a moment, threw himself back so that his elbow rested
on the table, his forehead being shaded by his hand, which, however, did
not hide the marks of introspective inflexibility on his features as
he narrated in fullest detail the incidents of the transaction with the
sailor. The tinge of indifference which had at first been visible in the
Scotchman now disappeared.

Henchard went on to describe his attempts to find his wife; the oath he
swore; the solitary life he led during the years which followed. "I have
kept my oath for nineteen years," he went on; "I have risen to what you
see me now."

"Ay!"

"Well--no wife could I hear of in all that time; and being by nature
something of a woman-hater, I have found it no hardship to keep mostly