Bathsheba Calls at Oak's Cottage — Far from the Madding Crowd

Bathsheba revives with the spring, but spends most of her time alone and will not let even Liddy near. She walks into the village for the first time since Christmas on a Friday evening in August, pale against her black gown. While the choir practises, she slips into the churchyard and reads the new words cut below Fanny Robin's on the tombstone: Francis Troy, who died on Christmas Eve, lies in the same grave. The children in the church sing 'Lead, kindly Light', and she weeps, finding that grief has become a luxury rather than a scourge. Oak finds her in the porch, wet-faced. He is a bass singer now, and he tells her, awkwardly, that he may give up managing her farm and go to California. She is hurt, and tells him she thought they were old friends. 'It is because of that very helplessness,' he says, 'that I feel bound to go', and he leaves by a path she cannot follow.

For weeks Oak avoids her, sends notes without a heading, and only comes to the house when she is out. On Christmas Day he turns away as she looks for him after church. The next morning a letter arrives, saying he will not renew his engagement at Lady-day. Bathsheba sits and weeps over it, wounded that her last old disciple has gone, and that she feels despised. That evening she goes down to his cottage, and they are both stiff and awkward on hard wooden chairs. She says she fears she has offended him. He says he is not emigrating after all, but that people are saying he is waiting for Boldwood's farm with a thought of getting her. She says it is too absurd, or too soon to think of. He agrees that it is absurd, and she insists she said 'too soon', and begs him to believe her.

He says that if only he knew whether she would allow him to love and win her, and she answers that he never will know, because he never asks. He explains that the letter was only to protect her good name, and she laughs through her tears that it seems as if she had come courting him. He walks her up the hill, explaining the details of the new farm. They say very little of their mutual feeling, which Hardy thinks may not be needed between friends who have known each other's rougher sides first.