Hardy uses several omens to warn the readers that something is about to happen to the characters. Consider, for example, Tess' serendipitous meeting with Angel in Chapter 1, which foreshadowed their later meeting. That both Tess and Angel recall that meeting in this chapter brings a poignancy to their current situation. The reader knows, as Tess does, what happened between her first meeting with Angel and her second. Angel does not share this knowledge and simply regrets having not danced with Tess or staying in Marlott, saying "If I had only known!" — a sentiment, no doubt, that Tess surely feels and with greater reason. Hardy increases the sense of foreboding with Tess' failed attempts at revealing her secret. She volunteers time and again to tell Angel of her past only to be rebuffed each time.
Beyond this, Hardy piles up the signs, each one sharpening the readers' sense of doom for the pair: The settling on the last day of the year, December 31, to be married; the misdirected note (a common literary contrivance that Hardy makes full use of in Chapter 33), the kisses that Angel bestows on each of the dairymaids. Further heightening the sense of foreboding are the omens that Hardy specifically points out as being portents: the d'Urberville Coach legend and the rooster crowing at noon. In combination, all the omens from these chapters prefigure events to come in the next phase of the novel. Although hopeful readers may want to see the events at Talbothays Dairy following Tess and Angel's departure as the events that the omens prefigured (the attempted suicide, the drunkenness, and the depression of Tess' friends), Hardy's choice of title for the next part — Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays — undermines what little glimmer of hope he may have tried to offer.
