“O, do not speak against him! It was through you! He found out—”
“Ah, is it so!... That’s sad, Tess!”
“Yes.”
“But to stay away from you—to leave you to work like this!”
“He does not leave me to work!” she cried, springing to the defence of the absent one with all her fervour. “He don’t know it! It is by my own arrangement.”
“Then, does he write?”
“I—I cannot tell you. There are things which are private to ourselves.”
“Of course that means that he does not. You are a deserted wife, my fair Tess—”
In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the buff-glove was on it, and he seized only the rough leather fingers which did not express the life or shape of those within.
“You must not—you must not!” she cried fearfully, slipping her hand from the glove as from a pocket, and leaving it in his grasp. “O, will you go away—for the sake of me and my husband—go, in the name of your own Christianity!”