Try as she might, Elizabeth could never meet with him. She believed
in him still, though nobody else did; and she wanted to be allowed to
forgive him for his roughness to her, and to help him in his trouble.
She wrote to him; he did not reply. She then went to his house--the
great house she had lived in so happily for a time--with its front
of dun brick, vitrified here and there and its heavy sash-bars--but
Henchard was to be found there no more. The ex-Mayor had left the home
of his prosperity, and gone into Jopp's cottage by the Priory Mill--the
sad purlieu to which he had wandered on the night of his discovery that
she was not his daughter. Thither she went.
Elizabeth thought it odd that he had fixed on this spot to retire to,
but assumed that necessity had no choice. Trees which seemed old enough
to have been planted by the friars still stood around, and the back
hatch of the original mill yet formed a cascade which had raised its
terrific roar for centuries. The cottage itself was built of old
stones from the long dismantled Priory, scraps of tracery, moulded
window-jambs, and arch-labels, being mixed in with the rubble of the
walls.
In this cottage he occupied a couple of rooms, Jopp, whom Henchard
had employed, abused, cajoled, and dismissed by turns, being the
householder.
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