What Troy did was to sink upon his knees with
an indefinable union of remorse and reverence upon
his face, and, bending over Fanny Robin, gently kissed
her, as one would kiss an infant asleep to avoid
awakening it.
At the sight and sound of that, to her, unendurable
act, Bathsheba sprang towards him. All the strong
feelings which had been scattered over her existence
since she knew what feeling was, seemed gathered
together into one pulsation now. The revulsion from
her indignant mood a little earlier, when she had
meditated upon compromised honour, forestalment,
eclipse in maternity by another, was violent and entire.
All that was forgotten in the simple and still strong
attachment of wife to husband. She had sighed for
her self-completeness then, and now she cried aloud
against the severance of the union she had deplored.
She flung her arms round Troy's neck, exclaiming wildly
from the deepest deep of her heart --
"Don't -- don't kiss them! O, Frank, I can"t bear
it-i can't! I love you better than she did: kiss me
too, Frank -- kiss me! You will, Frank, kiss me too!"
There was something so abnormal and startling in
the childlike pain and simplicity of this appeal from a
woman of Bathsheba's calibre and independence, that
Troy, loosening her tightly clasped arms from his neck,
looked at her in bewilderment.
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