Bathsheba laid down the shears.
“I cannot allow any man to—to criticise my private conduct!” she exclaimed. “Nor will I for a minute. So you’ll please leave the farm at the end of the week!”
It may have been a peculiarity—at any rate it was a fact—that when Bathsheba was swayed by an emotion of an earthly sort her lower lip trembled: when by a refined emotion, her upper or heavenward one. Her nether lip quivered now.
“Very well, so I will,” said Gabriel calmly. He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break. “I should be even better pleased to go at once,” he added.
“Go at once then, in Heaven’s name!” said she, her eyes flashing at his, though never meeting them. “Don’t let me see your face any more.”
“Very well, Miss Everdene—so it shall be.”
And he took his shears and went away from her in placid dignity, as Moses left the presence of Pharaoh.
CHAPTER XXI
TROUBLES IN THE FOLD—A MESSAGE
Gabriel Oak had ceased to feed the Weatherbury flock for about four-and-twenty hours, when on Sunday afternoon the elderly gentlemen Joseph Poorgrass, Matthew Moon, Fray, and half-a-dozen others, came running up to the house of the mistress of the Upper Farm.
“Whatever is the matter, men?” she said, meeting them at the door just as she was coming out on her way to church, and ceasing in a moment from the close compression of her two red lips, with which she had accompanied the exertion of pulling on a tight glove.