She arrived by the ten o'clock train on the day aforesaid, Jude not
going to meet her at the station, by her special request, that he
should not lose a morning's work and pay, she said (if this were
her true reason). But so well by this time did he know Sue that the
remembrance of their mutual sensitiveness at emotional crises might,
he thought, have weighed with her in this. When he came home to
dinner she had taken possession of her apartment.
She lived in the same house with him, but on a different floor, and
they saw each other little, an occasional supper being the only meal
they took together, when Sue's manner was something like that of a
scared child. What she felt he did not know; their conversation was
mechanical, though she did not look pale or ill. Phillotson came
frequently, but mostly when Jude was absent. On the morning of the
wedding, when Jude had given himself a holiday, Sue and her cousin
had breakfast together for the first and last time during this
curious interval; in his room--the parlour--which he had hired for
the period of Sue's residence. Seeing, as women do, how helpless he
was in making the place comfortable, she bustled about.
"What's the matter, Jude?" she said suddenly.
He was leaning with his elbows on the table and his chin on his
hands, looking into a futurity which seemed to be sketched out on the
tablecloth.
"Oh--nothing!"
"You are 'father', you know. That's what they call the man who gives
you away."
Jude could have said "Phillotson's age entitles him to be called
that!" But he would not annoy her by such a cheap retort.
She talked incessantly, as if she dreaded his indulgence in
reflection, and before the meal was over both he and she wished they
had not put such confidence in their new view of things, and had
taken breakfast apart. What oppressed Jude was the thought that,
having done a wrong thing of this sort himself, he was aiding and
abetting the woman he loved in doing a like wrong thing, instead of
imploring and warning her against it. It was on his tongue to say,
"You have quite made up your mind?"
After breakfast they went out on an errand together moved by a mutual
thought that it was the last opportunity they would have of indulging
in unceremonious companionship. By the irony of fate, and the
curious trick in Sue's nature of tempting Providence at critical
times, she took his arm as they walked through the muddy street--a
thing she had never done before in her life--and on turning the
corner they found themselves close to a grey perpendicular church
with a low-pitched roof--the church of St. Thomas.