 his four-footed dependants, the celibate would walk and meditate of
an evening till the moon's rays streamed in through the cobwebbed windows, or
total darkness enveloped the scene.
    His square-framed perpendicularity showed more fully now than in the crowd
and bustle of the market-house. In this meditative walk his foot met the floor
with heel and toe simultaneously, and his fine reddish-fleshed face was bent
downwards just enough to render obscure the still mouth and the well-rounded
though rather prominent and broad chin. A few clear and thread-like horizontal
lines were the only interruption to the otherwise smooth surface of his large
forehead.
    The phases of Boldwood's life were ordinary enough, but his was not an
ordinary nature. That stillness, which struck casual observers more than
anything else in his character and habit, and seemed so precisely like the rest
of inanition, may have been the perfect balance of enormous antagonistic forces
- positives and negatives in fine adjustment. His equilibrium disturbed, he was
in extremity at once. If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him; a
feeling not mastering him was entirely latent. Stagnant or rapid, it was never
slow. He was always hit mortally, or he was missed.
    He had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for good or
for evil. Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the details, he was serious
throughout all. He saw no absurd sides to the follies of life, and thus, though
not quite companionable in the eyes of merry men and scoffers, and those to whom
all things show life as a jest, he was not intolerable to the earnest and those
acquainted with grief. Being a man who read all the dramas of life seriously, if
he failed to please when they were comedies, there was no frivolous treatment to
reproach him for when they chanced to end tragically.
    Bathsheba was far from dreaming that the dark and silent shape upon which
she had so carelessly thrown a seed was a hotbed of tropic intensity. Had she
known Boldwood's moods her blame would have been fearful, and the stain upon her
heart ineradicable. Moreover, had she known her present power for good or evil
over this man, she would have trembled at her responsibility. Luckily for her
present, unluckily for her future tranquillity, her understanding had not yet
told her what Boldwood was. Nobody knew entirely; for though it was possible to
form guesses concerning his wild capabilities from old floodmarks faintly
visible, he had never been seen at the high tides which caused them.
    Farmer Boldwood came to
