Her allotted hour having been passed in chatting and looking on Bathsheba told Liddy not to hurry herself and went to the small parlour to prepare for departure, which, like the hall, was decorated with holly and ivy, and well lighted up.

Nobody was in the room, but she had hardly been there a moment when the master of the house entered.

`Mrs Troy - you are not going?' he said. `We've hardly begun!'

`If you'll excuse me, I should like to go now.' Her manner was restive for she remembered her promise, and imagined what he was about to say. `But as it is not late,' she added, `I can walk home, and leave my man and Liddy to come when they choose.'

`I've been trying to get an opportunity of speaking to you,' said Boldwood. `You know perhaps what I long to say?'

Bathsheba silently looked on the floor.

`You do give it?' he said, eagerly.

`What?' she whispered.

`Now, that's evasion! Why, the promise. I don't want to intrude upon you at all, or to let it become known to anybody. But do give your word! A mere business compact, you know, between two people who are beyond the influence of passion.' Boldwood knew how false this picture was as regarded himself; but he had proved that it was the only tone in which she would allow him to approach her. `A promise to marry me at the end of five years and three quarters. You owe it to me!'

`I feel that I do,' said Bathsheba; `that is, if you demand it. But I am a changed woman - an unhappy woman - and not - not--'

`You are still a very beautiful woman,' said Boldwood. Honesty and pure conviction suggested the remark, unaccompanied by any perception that it might have been adopted by blunt flattery to soothe and win her.

However, it had not much effect now, for she said, in a passionless murmur which was in itself a proof of her words: `I have no feeling in the matter at all. And I don't at all know what is right to do in my difficult position, and I have nobody to advise me. But I give my promise, if I must. I give it as the rendering of a debt, conditionally, of course, on my being a widow.'

`You'll marry me between five and six years hence?'

`Don't press me too hard. I'll marry nobody else.'

`But surely you will name the time, or there's nothing in the promise at all?'

`O I don't know, pray let me go!' she said, her bosom beginning to rise. `I am afraid what to do! I want to be just to you, and to be that seems to be wronging myself, and perhaps it is breaking the commandments. There is considerable doubt of his death, and then it is dreadful; let me ask a solicitor, Mr Boldwood, if I ought or no!'

`Say the words, dear one, and the subject shall be dismissed; a blissful loving intimacy of six years, and then marriage - O Bathsheba, say them!' he begged in a husky voice, unable to sustain the forms of mere friendship any longer. `Promise yourself to me; I deserve it, indeed I do, for I have loved you more than anybody in the world! And if I said hasty words and showed uncalled-for heat of manner towards you, believe me, dear, I did not mean to distress you; I was in agony, Bathsheba, and I did not know what I said. You wouldn't let a dog suffer what I have suffered, could you but know it! Sometimes I