 is this?« she said. »You called my father Michael as if you knew him
well? And how is it he has got this power over you, that you promise to marry
him against your will? Ah - you have many many secrets from me!«
    »Perhaps you have some from me,« Lucetta murmured with closed eyes, little
thinking, however, so unsuspicious was she, that the secret of Elizabeth's heart
concerned the young man who had caused this damage to her own.
    »I would not - do anything against you at all!« stammered Elizabeth, keeping
in all signs of emotion till she was ready to burst. »I cannot understand how my
father can command you so; I don't sympathize with him in it at all. I'll go to
him and ask him to release you.«
    »No, no,« said Lucetta. »Let it all be.«
 

                                     XXVIII

The next morning Henchard went to the Town Hall below Lucetta's house, to attend
Petty Sessions, being still a magistrate for the year by virtue of his late
position as Mayor. In passing he looked up at her windows, but nothing of her
was to be seen.
    Henchard as a Justice of the Peace may at first seem to be an even greater
incongruity than Shallow and Silence themselves. But his rough and ready
perceptions, his sledge-hammer directness, had often served him better than nice
legal knowledge in despatching such simple business as fell to his hands in this
Court. To-day Dr. Chalkfield, the Mayor for the year, being absent, the
corn-merchant took the big chair, his eyes still abstractedly stretching out of
the window to the ashlar front of High-Place Hall.
    There was one case only, and the offender stood before him. She was an old
woman of mottled countenance, attired in a shawl of that nameless tertiary hue
which comes, but cannot be made - a hue neither tawny, russet, hazel, nor ash; a
sticky black bonnet that seemed to have been worn in the country of the Psalmist
where the clouds drop fatness; and an apron that had been white in times so
comparatively recent as still to contrast visibly with the rest of her clothes.
The steeped aspect of the woman as a whole showed her to be no native of the
country-side or even of a country-town.
    She looked cursorily at Henchard and the second magistrate, and Henchard
looked at her, with a momentary pause, as if she had reminded him indistinctly
of somebody or something which passed from
