The Sword Exercise in the Ferns — Far from the Madding Crowd

At eight on a midsummer evening Bathsheba walks into the tall ferns on the hill opposite her house, then turns and goes half-way back to her own door, having decided not to meet Troy after all. She sees a dim patch of red move round the shoulder of the rise, thinks of his disappointment at a broken promise, waits one minute, then two, and runs back across the field, trembling at her own boldness. He is standing at the bottom of a saucer-shaped pit among the ferns, with a floor of moss, and he gives her his hand down the slope.

He draws the sword, which gleams in the sun like a living thing, and names the cuts: one as if sowing corn, two as if hedging, three as if reaping, four as if threshing. She asks to be spared the ones and threes, which are terrible. He sets her a yard in front of him and tests her with a thrust that seems to pass through her body from hip to ribs and come out clean, and she finds she is not afraid. Then the blade fills the air with light and hissing, never touching her, and Hardy says that the space left untouched would have been nearly a mould of her figure. Troy cuts off a lock of her hair, spits a caterpillar on her bodice, and shows her that the sword he swore was blunt will shave like a razor. He told her a fib to keep her still. She was, he says, within half an inch of being pared alive two hundred and ninety-five times.

She sits down on a tuft of heather, overcome. Troy picks up the severed lock, twists it round his fingers, and puts it inside his coat, and she feels she cannot deny him. He draws nearer, and a minute later his scarlet form is gone into the ferns like a brand swiftly waved. Bathsheba is left stung to the soles of her feet, in tears, like one who has sinned a great sin. Hardy gives the reason only in his last line: Troy's mouth had dipped down upon her own. He had kissed her.