your coming, and I am going home-along. Good-night to ye, shepherd."

"Can you get me a lodging?" inquired Gabriel.

"That I can't, indeed," he said, moving past Oak as a Christian edges
past an offertory-plate when he does not mean to contribute. "If you
follow on the road till you come to Warren's Malthouse, where they
are all gone to have their snap of victuals, I daresay some of 'em
will tell you of a place. Good-night to ye, shepherd."

The bailiff who showed this nervous dread of loving his neighbour as
himself, went up the hill, and Oak walked on to the village, still
astonished at the reencounter with Bathsheba, glad of his nearness to
her, and perplexed at the rapidity with which the unpractised girl of
Norcombe had developed into the supervising and cool woman here. But
some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.

Obliged, to some extent, to forgo dreaming in order to find the way,
he reached the churchyard, and passed round it under the wall where
several ancient trees grew. There was a wide margin of grass along
here, and Gabriel's footsteps were deadened by its softness, even at
this indurating period of the year. When abreast of a trunk which
appeared to be the oldest of the old, he became aware that a figure
was standing behind it. Gabriel did not pause in his walk, and in
another moment he accidentally kicked a loose stone. The noise was
enough to disturb the motionless stranger, who started and assumed
a careless position.

It was a slim girl, rather thinly clad.