At dusk, on the evening of St. Valentine’s Day, Boldwood sat down to supper as usual, by a beaming fire of aged logs.
Upon the mantel-shelf before him was a time-piece, surmounted by a spread eagle, and upon the eagle’s wings was the letter Bathsheba had sent.
Here the bachelor’s gaze was continually fastening itself, till the large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye; and as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon, although they were too remote for his sight,— 'MARRY ME.
' The pert injunction was like those crystal substances which, colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about them.
Here, in the quiet of Boldwood’s parlour, where everything that was not grave was extraneous, and where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan Sunday lasting all the week, the letter and its dictum changed their tenor from the thoughtlessness of their origin to a deep solemnity, imbibed from their accessories now.
Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood had felt the spherical completeness of his existence heretofore to be slowly spreading into an abnormal distortion in the particular direction of an ideal passion.
The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus—the eontemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great. The letter must have had an origin and a motive. That the latter was of the smallest magnitude compatible with its existence at all, Boldwood, of course, did not know.
And such an explanation did not strike him as a possibility even.
It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the very dissimilar processes of approving a course suggested by circumstance, and striking out a course from inner impulse and intention purely, would look