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She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learnt what an impassioned woman’s kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.

‘There—now do you believe?’ she asked, flushed, and wiping her eyes.

‘Yes. I never really doubted—never, never!’

So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against them. She had consented. She might as well have agreed at first. The ‘appetite for joy’ which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.

‘I must write to my mother,’ she said, ‘You don’t mind my doing that?’

‘Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know how very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how wrong it would be in me to object. Where does she live?’

‘At the same place—Marlott. On the farther side of Blackmoor Vale.’