"But haven't you found him?" said the doctor.
"Yes....I cannot tell 'ee!" Henchard replied as he sank down on a chair
within the entrance. "He can't be home for two hours."
"H'm," said the surgeon, returning upstairs.
"How is she?" asked Henchard of Elizabeth, who formed one of the group.
"In great danger, father. Her anxiety to see her husband makes her
fearfully restless. Poor woman--I fear they have killed her!"
Henchard regarded the sympathetic speaker for a few instants as if she
struck him in a new light, then, without further remark, went out of
the door and onward to his lonely cottage. So much for man's rivalry,
he thought. Death was to have the oyster, and Farfrae and himself the
shells. But about Elizabeth-lane; in the midst of his gloom she seemed
to him as a pin-point of light. He had liked the look on her face as she
answered him from the stairs. There had been affection in it, and above
all things what he desired now was affection from anything that was good
and pure. She was not his own, yet, for the first time, he had a faint
dream that he might get to like her as his own,--if she would only
continue to love him.
Jopp was just going to bed when Henchard got home. As the latter entered
the door Jopp said, "This is rather bad about Mrs. Farfrae's illness."
"Yes," said Henchard shortly, though little dreaming of Jopp s
complicity in the night's harlequinade, and raising his eyes just
sufficiently to observe that Jopp's face was lined with anxiety.
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