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money-market in calculations upon his chances. His dog waited for his meals in a way so like that in which Oak waited for the girl’s presence, that the farmer was quite struck with the resemblance, felt it lowering, and would not look at the dog. However, he continued to watch through the hedge for her regular coming, and thus his sentiments towards her were deepened without any corresponding effect being produced upon herself. Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ … so he said no word at all.
    By making inquiries he found that the girl’s name was Bathsheba Everdene, and the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day. At last the eighth day came. The cow had ceased to give milk for that year, and Bathsheba Everdene came up the hill no more. Gabriel had reached a pitch of existence he never could have anticipated a short time before. He liked saying “Bathsheba” as a private enjoyment instead of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly small. Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.
    His transports of delight in the river, by now a daily event, now seemed to him to be less of a naturally occurring phenomenon than an all-powerful urge for connection with a divine being that had taken on her physical shape, and his frenzied fancies at his climax re-created in his mind a thousand images of this siren; Bathsheba milking in the lantern-light, leaning her head into the cow’s flank, pulling rhythmically at the udders, Bathsheba lying flat, back to back with her heaving pony beneath the trees, Bathsheba holding and stroking his head upon her open legs. How quickly his mind then raced to other, delightfully imagined scenes: Bathsheba opening his waistband, laying her small fingers gently upon his burning, swollen flesh with insistent, rhythmical caresses; Bathsheba yielding to his need, lifting her cotton work dress, opening her pantalettes, revealing her purse of velvet to him; Bathsheba taking fire from his passion, urging him to unite his body with hers, begging him to raise her to undreamt of heights of ecstasy.
    Oak began now to see light in this direction, and said to himself, “I’ll make her my wife, or upon my soul I shall be good for nothing!”
    All this while he was perplexing himself about an errand on which he might consistently visit the cottage of Bathsheba’s aunt.
    He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe, mother of a living lamb. On a day which had a summer face and a winter constitution — a fine January morning, when there was just enough blue sky visible to make cheerfully-disposed people wish for more, and an occasional gleam of silvery sunshine, Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday basket, and stalked across the fields to the house of Mrs. Hurst, the aunt — George, the dog walking behind, with a countenance of great concern at the serious turn pastoral affairs seemed to be taking.
    Gabriel had watched the blue wood-smoke curling from the chimney with strange meditation. At evening he had fancifully traced it down the chimney to the spot of its origin — seen the hearth and Bathsheba beside it — beside it in her out-door dress; for the clothes she had worn on the hill were by association equally with her person included in the compass of his affection; they seemed at this early time of his love a necessary ingredient of the sweet mixture called Bathsheba Everdene, although to picture her in garments of a more diaphanous nature, arousing though the prospect might