me! Where are your pleasant words all gone--your earnest hope to
be able to love me? Where is your firm conviction that you would get
to care for me very much? Really forgotten?--really?"

She checked emotion, looked him quietly and clearly in the face, and
said in her low, firm voice, "Mr. Boldwood, I promised you nothing.
Would you have had me a woman of clay when you paid me that furthest,
highest compliment a man can pay a woman--telling her he loves her?
I was bound to show some feeling, if I would not be a graceless
shrew. Yet each of those pleasures was just for the day--the day
just for the pleasure. How was I to know that what is a pastime to
all other men was death to you? Have reason, do, and think more
kindly of me!"

"Well, never mind arguing--never mind. One thing is sure: you
were all but mine, and now you are not nearly mine. Everything is
changed, and that by you alone, remember. You were nothing to me
once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how
different the second nothing is from the first! Would to God you
had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!"

Bathsheba, in spite of her mettle, began to feel unmistakable signs
that she was inherently the weaker vessel. She strove miserably
against this femininity which would insist upon supplying unbidden
emotions in stronger and stronger current. She had tried to elude
agitation by fixing her mind on the trees, sky, any trivial object
before her eyes, whilst his reproaches fell, but ingenuity could not
save her now.

"I did not take you up--surely I did not!" she answered as heroically
as she could. "But don't be in this mood with me. I can endure
being told I am in the wrong, if you will only tell it me gently!
O sir, will you not kindly forgive me, and look at it cheerfully?"

"Cheerfully! Can a man fooled to utter heart-burning find a reason
for being merry? If I have lost, how can I be as if I had won?
Heavens you must be heartless quite! Had I known what a fearfully
bitter sweet this was to be, how I would have avoided you, and never
seen you, and been deaf of you. I tell you all this, but what do you
care! You don't care."

She returned silent and weak denials to his charges, and swayed
her head desperately, as if to thrust away the words as they came
showering about her ears from the lips of the trembling man in the
climax of life, with his bronzed Roman face and fine frame.

"Dearest,