Bathsheba Meets Sergeant Troy in the Firs — Far from the Madding Crowd

Since she dismissed her bailiff, Bathsheba makes the last round of the farm herself each night with a dark lantern, never knowing that Gabriel has nearly always walked the same ground before her. Hardy remarks that women never tire of bewailing a man's fickleness, yet only seem to snub his constancy. This night she looks over the stables and the paddock, where the Devon cows breathe and munch in the dark, and then takes the short way home through a plantation of young firs, black at midnight as the ninth plague of Egypt. Footsteps come towards her. Something tugs at her skirt and pins it to the ground.

The man who is hooked to her says 'A rum start', takes her lantern and opens it, and the light shows a young sergeant in brass and scarlet whose spur is tangled in the gimp of her dress. The unfastening takes a very long time. He thanks her for the sight of a beautiful face, touches her hand, and tells her it is no use blinking the matter, she is a prisoner. She accuses him of making the tangle worse on purpose, and he says he does not think so, with a merry twinkle. He has seen many women, he says, and never one so beautiful, and she may take it or leave it. When he gives his name as Sergeant Troy she backs away inch by inch until she can no longer see the red of his coat, and then runs indoors.

Liddy, half asleep, tells her what she knows: a gay man, a doctor's son by name and an earl's son by nature, who wasted his gifted lot and listed as a soldier. Bathsheba cannot decide whether she was insulted. Hardy says that girls will put up with a good deal when they want to be praised, which is often, and by bedtime she is blaming herself for skulking away from a man who was only civil. He adds one more thing, as lightly as a man dropping a coin. It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once told her she was beautiful.