biddy, elevating her feelings
to the occasion from a sense of grandeur, floated off
behind Bathsheba with a milder dignity not entirely
free from travesty, and the door was closed.
CHAPTER XI
OUTSIDE THE BARRACKS -- SNOW -- A MEETING
FOR dreariness nothing could surpass a prospect in the
outskirts of a certain town and military station, many
miles north of Weatherbury, at a later hour on this
same snowy evening -- if that may be called a prospect
of which the chief constituent was darkness.
It was a night when sorrow may come to the
brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity:
when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitous-
ness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope: when
the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret
at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by,
and anticipation does not prompt to enterprise.
The scene was a public path, bordered on the left
hand by a river, behind which rose a high wall. On
the right was a tract of land, partly meadow'and partly
moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a wide undulating
uplan.
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