“About a month or two. A handsome, full-figured woman. They had this room.”
When Jude came back and sat down to supper Sue seemed moping and miserable. “Jude,” she said to him plaintively, at their parting that night upon the landing, “it is not so nice and pleasant as it used to be with us! I don’t like it here—I can’t bear the place! And I don’t like you so well as I did!”
“How fidgeted you seem, dear! Why do you change like this?”
“Because it was cruel to bring me here!”
“Why?”
“You were lately here with Arabella. There, now I have said it!”
“Dear me, why—” said Jude looking round him. “Yes—it is the same! I really didn’t know it, Sue. Well—it is not cruel, since we have come as we have—two relations staying together.”
“How long ago was it you were here? Tell me, tell me!”
“The day before I met you in Christminster, when we went back to Marygreen together. I told you I had met her.”
“Yes, you said you had met her, but you didn’t tell me all. Your story was that you had met as estranged people, who were not husband and wife at all in Heaven’s sight—not that you had made it up with her.”