“Tess!” he said.
She slackened speed without looking round.
“Tess!” he repeated. “It is I—Alec d’Urberville.”
She then looked back at him, and he came up.
“I see it is,” she answered coldly.
“Well—is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course,” he added, with a slight laugh, “there is something of the ridiculous to your eyes in seeing me like this. But—I must put up with that. … I heard you had gone away; nobody knew where. Tess, you wonder why I have followed you?”
“I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my heart!”
“Yes—you may well say it,” he returned grimly, as they moved onward together, she with unwilling tread. “But don’t mistake me; I beg this because you may have been led to do so in noticing—if you did notice it—how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there. It was but a momentary faltering; and considering what you have been to me, it was natural enough. But will helped me through it—though perhaps you think me a humbug for saying it—and immediately afterwards I felt that of all persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire to save from the wrath to come—sneer if you like—the woman whom I had so grievously wronged was that person. I have come with that sole purpose in view—nothing more.”
There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: “Have you saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say.”