When Life Hits Rock Bottom — Far from the Madding Crowd

News reaches Gabriel that Bathsheba Everdene has left for Weatherbury, and Hardy observes what rejected lovers often deny: the more emphatic the renunciation, the less absolute it proves. Separation does not cool Oak's steady affection; it idealises her and burns with a finer, more painful flame still. He learns her destination only indirectly, while his brief friendship with her aunt withers after the failed suit.

On Norcombe Hill his young dog, earnest and wrong-headed, chases two hundred ewes until they break a rotten rail and plunge over the chalk-pit into the hollow below. Gabriel finds a heap of mangled carcasses at the foot and pities the gentle ewes before the arithmetic of ruin arrives. The sheep were uninsured; years of patient frugal labour collapse in a single morning.

The dog is shot at noon for doing his job too thoroughly, another Hardy irony about logic pursued to its bitter end. Because Gabriel's stock was advanced by a dealer against character, the sale of plant and implements barely clears the debt. He stands in the clothes he wears, free and bankrupt, and his first waking thought is thankfulness that he is not married into the poverty now upon him.