ways the tune for such times, though it is now nearly disused). They came and passed the oriel, where an officer or two, looking up and discovering Mrs. Maumbry, saluted her, whose eyes filled with tears as the notes of the band waned away. Before the little group had recovered from that sense of the romantic which such spectacles impart, Mr. Maumbry came along the pavement. He probably had bidden his former brethren-in-arms a farewell at the top of the street, for he walked from that direction in his rather shab clerical clothes, and with a basket on his arm which seemed to hold some purchases he had been making for his poorer parishioners. Unlike the soldiers he went along quite unconscious of his appearance or of the scene around.
The contrast was too much for Laura. With lips that now quivered, she asked the invalid what he thought of the change that had come to her.
It was difficult to answer, and with a wilfulness that was too strong in her she repeated the question.
'Do you think,' she added, 'that a woman's husband has a right to do such a thing, even if he does feel a certain call to it?'
Her listener sympathized too largely with both of them to be anything but unsatisfactory in his reply. Laura gazed longingly out of the window towards the thin dusty line of Hussars, now smalling towards the Mellstock Ridge. 'I,' she said, 'who should have been in their van on the way to London, am doomed to fester in a hole on Durnover Lane!'
Many events had passed, and many rumours had been current concerning her before the invalid saw her again after her leave-taking that day.
V
Casterbridge had known many military and civil episodes; many happy times, and times less happy;
15
