Troy wandered along towards the west.
A composite feeling, made up of disgust with the, to him, humdrum tedium of a farmer’s life, gloomily images of her who lay in the churchyard, remorse, and a general aversion to his wife’s society, impelled him to seek a home in any place on earth save Weatherbury.
The sad accessories of Fanny’s end confronted him as vivid pictures which threatened to be indelible, and made life in Bathsheba’s house intolerable.
At three in the afternoon he found himself at the foot of a slope more than a mile in length, which ran to the ridge of a range of hills lying parallel with the shore, and forming a monotonous barrier between the basin of cultivated country inland and the wilder scenery of the coast.
Up the hill stretched a road perfectly straight and perfectly white, the two sides approaching each other in a gradual taper till they met the sky at the top about two miles off.
Throughout the length of this narrow and irksome inclined plane not a sign of life was visible on this garish afternoon. Troy toiled up the road with a languor and depression greater than any he had experienced for many a day and year before.
The air was warm and muggy, and the top seemed to recede as he approached. At last he reached the summit, and a new and novel prospect burst upon him with an effect almost like that of the Pacific upon Balboa’s gaze.
The broad steely sea, marked only by faint lines, which had a semblance of being etched thereon to a degree not deep enough to disturb its general evenness, stretched the whole width of his front and round to the left, where, near the town and port of Budmouth, the sun