Two endings to Return of the Native - which would you choose?

I've read back a little and am reconsidering from yesterday's post - perhaps the death of Eustacia Vye is a suicide, it's hard to determine - Hardy, in his fashion, keeps everything dark and murky. She's crossing the heath with her former lover, Damon Wildeve, and he's supposedly altruistically helping her on the first leg of her journey to Paris and to a new life - but of course she's aware or ought to be aware of how guilty this makes her, and him, look - and of course he may be planning to leave his wife and leave for Paris with Eustacia, we never really know - but we do know that one of the villagers has put a voodoo like curse on Eustacia, and the curse proves to be effective. It's also very possible that in the darkness of night she fell into the weir and the rushing water. And it's also possible that she's in despair - perhpas fearful that she'll never make it to Paris, not at least with some of Wildeve's money, and maybe she hurls herself into the water. I just can't say; maybe others who've read this novel more often or more carefully have other clues. What's of more interest is the last section, which picks up the lives of the survivors, and we see, to nobody's surprise, that the reddleman Venn has literally cleaned up his act and he and the widow Thomasin become a couple. Perhaps more surprising is the fate of Clym Yeobright, the widower: it was obvious that there was nobody in town right for him - it would have been disastrous had he taken up with his first cousin, Thomasin, and he almost blunders into declaring his love for her before she cuts him off by telling him of her passion for Venn - so he becomes an itinerant preacher - probably the right course for this luckless, moralist, studious young man - I almost think he might turn up in another Hardy novel, or maybe in a Flannery O'Connor novel, in another guise. Too bad we don't get to hear him preach. The biggest surprise of all was a single author's footnote from Hardy, in which he says point blank that his plan was to leave all of the surviving characters as solitary loners - Venn in particular he notes that he was going to have him continue in his strange and isolate behavior and just disappear from Egdon heath forever - but the pressures of "serial publishing" demanded a happy ending (same happened in re Great Expectations) - and he leaves it to us, the readers, to choose the ending we prefer. Isn't it obvious that the lonely ending is more strange and moving and in keeping with the feeling of the rest of the novel and the rest of Hardy - these peculiar, insular people leading lives of few opportunities, the surrounding darkness, the strange appearances and disappearances of characters?