Angel asked her to marry him, and she refused, and then she accepted, because she loved him too much to refuse. Four times she tried to tell him about her past, and four times her courage failed. At last she wrote everything in a letter and pushed it under his door, but it slipped beneath the carpet, and he never saw it. They were married at the end of December. That night, by the fire, Angel confessed that he had once plunged into eight-and-forty hours of dissipation with a stranger in London. Tess forgave him at once, and pressed his hand, and told her own story. He did not forgive her. The woman I have been loving is not you, he said, but another woman in your shape. In a few days he went away to Brazil, and he told her not to follow him.