night, ma'am."

Then this small thesmothete stepped from the table, and surged out of
the hall, her black silk dress licking up a few straws and dragging
them along with a scratching noise upon the floor. Liddy, elevating
her feelings to the occasion from a sense of grandeur, floated
off behind Bathsheba with a milder dignity not entirely free from
travesty, and the door was closed.

CHAPTER XI

OUTSIDE THE BARRACKS--SNOW--A MEETING

For dreariness nothing could surpass a prospect in the outskirts of a
certain town and military station, many miles north of Weatherbury,
at a later hour on this same snowy evening--if that may be called a
prospect of which the chief constituent was darkness.

It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing
any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love
becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope:
when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at
opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation
does not prompt to enterprise.

The scene was a public path, bordered on the left hand by a river,
behind which rose a high wall. On the right was a tract of land,
partly meadow and partly moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a
wide undulating upland.

The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this
kind than amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close observer, they
are just as perceptible; the difference is that their media of
manifestation are less trite and familiar than such well-known ones
as the bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf. Many are not
so stealthy and gradual as we may be apt to imagine in considering
the general torpidity of a moor or waste. Winter, in coming to the
country hereabout, advanced in well-marked stages, wherein might
have been successively observed the retreat of the snakes, the
transformation of the ferns, the filling of the pools, a rising of
fogs, the embrowning by frost, the collapse of the fungi, and an
obliteration by snow.

This climax of the series had been reached to-night on the aforesaid
moor, and for the first time in the season its irregularities were
forms without features; suggestive of anything, proclaiming nothing,
and without more character than that of being the limit of something
else--the lowest layer of a firmament of snow. From this chaotic
skyful of crowding flakes the mead and moor momentarily rec