nd see where they have put Fanny.
The trees hide the place from your window."

Bathsheba had all sorts of dreads about meeting her husband. "Has
Mr. Troy been in to-night?" she said.

"No, ma'am; I think he's gone to Budmouth."

Budmouth! The sound of the word carried with it a much diminished
perspective of him and his deeds; there were thirteen miles interval
betwixt them now. She hated questioning Liddy about her husband's
movements, and indeed had hitherto sedulously avoided doing so; but
now all the house knew that there had been some dreadful disagreement
between them, and it was futile to attempt disguise. Bathsheba had
reached a stage at which people cease to have any appreciative regard
for public opinion.

"What makes you think he has gone there?" she said.

"Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this morning before
breakfast."

Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward heaviness of the
past twenty-four hours which had quenched the vitality of youth in
her without substituting the philosophy of maturer years, and she
resolved to go out and walk a little way. So when breakfast was
over, she put on her bonnet, and took a direction towards the church.
It was nine o'clock, and the men having returned to work again from
their first meal, she was not likely to meet many of them in the
road. Knowing that Fanny had been laid in the reprobates' quarter
of the graveyard, called in the parish "behind church," which was
invisible from the road, it was impossible to resist the impulse to
enter and look upon a spot which, from nameless feelings, she at
the same time dreaded to see. She had been unable to overcome an
impression that some connection existed between her rival and the
light through the trees.

Bathsheba skirted the buttress, and beheld the hole and the tomb, its
delicately veined surface splashed and stained just as Troy had seen
it and left it two hours earlier. On the other side of the scene
stood Gabriel. His eyes, too, were fixed on the tomb, and her
arrival having been noiseless, she had not as yet attracted his
attention. Bathsheba did not at once perceive that the grand tomb
and the disturbed grave were Fanny's, and she looked on both sides
and around for some humbler mound, earthed up and clodded in the
usual way. Then her eye followed Oak's, and she read the words with
which the inscription opened:--

ERECTED BY FRANCIS TROY
IN BELOVED MEMORY OF