CHAPTER XVII.
adventures by the shore.
Troy wandered along towards the west. A composite feeling, made up of disgust with the, to him, humdrum tedium of a farmer's life, gloomy 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
