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ting return. On approaching the nook in which the fold was constructed, the farmer drew out his pocket-book, unfastened-it, and allowed it to lie open on his hand. A letter was revealed -- Bathsheba's.
"I was going to ask you, Oak," he said, with unreal carelessness, "if you know whose writing this is?"
Oak glanced into the book, and replied instantly, with a flushed face, "Miss Everdene's."
Oak had coloured simply at the consciousness of sounding her name. He now felt a strangely distressing qualm from a new thought. The letter could of course be no other than anonymous, or the inquiry would not have been necessary.
Boldwood mistook his confusion: sensitive persons are always ready with their "Is it I?" in preference to objective reasoning.
"The question was perfectly fair," he returned -- and there was something incongruous in the serious earnestness with which he applied himself to an argument on a valentine. "You know it is always expected that privy inquiries will be made: that's where the -- fun lies." If the word "fun" had been "torture." it could not have been uttered with a more constrained and restless countenance than was Boldwood's then.
Soon parting from Gabriel, the lonely and reserved man returned to his house to breakfast -- feeling twinges of shame and regret at having so far exposed his mood by those fevered questions to a stranger. He again placed the letter on the mantelpiece, and sat down to think of the circumstances attending it by the light of Gabriel's information.
CHAPTER XVI
ALL SAINTS' AND ALL SOULS'
ON a week-day morning a small congregation, consisting mainly of women and girls, rose from its knees in the mouldy nave of a church called All Saints', in the distant barrack- town before mentioned, at the end of a service without a sermon. They were about to disperse, when a smart footstep, entering the porc