 stood, but it seemed so to him. »Here we went in, and here we sat
down. I faced this way. Then I drank, and committed my crime. It must have been
just on that very pixy-ring that she was standing when she said her last words
to me before going off with him; I can hear their sound now, and the sound of
her sobs: O Mike! I've lived with thee all this while, and had nothing but
temper. Now I'm no more to 'ee - I'll try my luck elsewhere. «
    He experienced not only the bitterness of a man who finds, in looking back
upon an ambitious course, that what he has sacrificed in sentiment was worth as
much as what he has gained in substance; but the superadded bitterness of seeing
his very recantation nullified. He had been sorry for all this long ago; but his
attempts to replace ambition by love had been as fully foiled as his ambition
itself. His wronged wife had foiled them by a fraud so grandly simple as to be
almost a virtue. It was an odd sequence that out of all this tampering with
social law came that flower of Nature, Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his
hands of life arose from his perception of its contrarious inconsistencies - of
Nature's jaunty readiness to support unorthodox social principles.
    He intended to go on from this place - visited as an act of penance - into
another part of the country altogether. But he could not help thinking of
Elizabeth, and the quarter of the horizon in which she lived. Out of this it
happened that the centrifugal tendency imparted by weariness of the world was
counteracted by the centripetal influence of his love for his stepdaughter. As a
consequence, instead of following a straight course yet further away from
Casterbridge, Henchard gradually, almost unconsciously, deflected from that
right line of his first intention; till, by degrees, his wandering, like that of
the Canadian woodsman, became part of a circle of which Casterbridge formed the
centre. In ascending any particular hill he ascertained the bearings as nearly
as he could by means of the sun, moon, or stars, and settled in his mind the
exact direction in which Casterbridge and Elizabeth-Jane lay. Sneering at
himself for his weakness he yet every hour - nay, every few minutes -
conjectured her actions for the time being - her sitting down and rising up, her
goings and comings, till thought of Newson's and Farfrae's counter-influence
would pass like a cold blast over a pool, and
