FANNY ROBIN

Oak saw her, and his first act was to gaze inquiringly and learn how
she received this knowledge of the authorship of the work, which to
himself had caused considerable astonishment. But such discoveries
did not much affect her now. Emotional convulsions seemed to have
become the commonplaces of her history, and she bade him good
morning, and asked him to fill in the hole with the spade which
was standing by. Whilst Oak was doing as she desired, Bathsheba
collected the flowers, and began planting them with that sympathetic
manipulation of roots and leaves which is so conspicuous in a woman's
gardening, and which flowers seem to understand and thrive upon. She
requested Oak to get the churchwardens to turn the leadwork at the
mouth of the gurgoyle that hung gaping down upon them, that by this
means the stream might be directed sideways, and a repetition of the
accident prevented. Finally, with the superfluous magnanimity of
a woman whose narrower instincts have brought down bitterness upon
her instead of love, she wiped the mud spots from the tomb as if she
rather liked its words than otherwise, and went again home. [2]

[Footnote 2: The local tower and churchyard do not answer
precisely to the foregoing description.]

CHAPTER XLVII

ADVENTURES BY THE SHORE

Troy wandered along towards the south. A composite feeling, made up
of disgust with the, to him, humdrum tediousness of a farmer's life,
gloomy images of her who lay in the churchyard, remorse, and a
general averseness to his wife's society, impelled him to seek a
home in any place on earth save Weatherbury. The sad accessories of
Fanny's end confronted him as vivid pictures which threatened to be
indelible, and made life in Bathsheba's house intolerable. At three
in the afternoon he found himself at the foot of a slope more than
a mile in length, which ran to the ridge of a range of hills lying
parallel with the shore, and forming a monotonous barrier between
the basin of cultivated country inland and the wilder scenery of the
coast. Up the hill stretched a road nearly straight and perfectly
white, the two sides approaching each other in a gradual taper till
they met the sky at the top about two miles off. Throughout the
length of this narrow and irksome inclined plane not a sign of life
was visible on this garish afternoon. Troy toiled up the road with a
languor and depression greater than any he had experienced for