Soon Oak too went homeward, by a different route from theirs. In front of him against the wet glazed surface of the lane he saw a person walking yet more slowly than himself under an umbrella. The man turned and plainly started; he was Boldwood.
"How are you this morning, sir?" said Oak.
"Yes, it is a wet day. -- Oh, I am well, very well, I thank you; quite well."
"I am glad to hear it, sir."
Boldwood seemed to awake to the present by degrees.
"You look tired and ill, Oak." he said then, desultorily regarding his companion.
"I am tired. You look strangely altered, sir."
"I? Not a bit of it: I am well enough. What put that into your head?"
"I thought you didn't look quite so topping as you used to, that was all."
"Indeed, then you are mistaken." said Boldwood, shortly. "Nothing hurts me. My constitution is an iron one."
"I've been working hard to get our ricks covered, and was barely in time. Never had such a struggle in my life.... Yours of course are safe, sir."
"O yes." Boldwood added, after an interval of silence: " What did you ask, Oak?"
"Your ricks are all covered before this time?"
"No."
"At any rate, the large ones upon the stone staddles?"
"They are not."
"Them under the hedge?"
"No. I forgot to tell the thatcher to set about it."
"Nor the little one by the stile?"Nor the little one by the stile. I overlooked the ricks this year."
"Then not a tenth of your corn will come to measure, sir."
"Possibly not.
"Overlooked them." repeated Gabriel slowly to himself. It is difficult to describe the intensely dramatic effect that announcement had upon Oak at such a moment. All the night he had been feeling that the neglect he was labouring to repair was abnormal and isolated -- the only instance of the kind within the circuit of the county. Yet at this very time, within the same parish, a greater waste had been going on, uncomplained of and disregarded. A few months earlier Boldwood's forgetting his husbandry would have been as preposterous an idea as a sailor forgetting he was in a ship. Oak was just thinking that whatever he himself might have suffered from Bathsheba's marriage, here was a man who had suffered more, when Boldwood spoke in a changed voice -- that of one who yearned to make a confidence and relieve his heart by an outpouring.
"Oak, you know as well as I that things have gone wrong with me lately. I may as well own it. I was going to get a little settled in life; but in some way my plan has come to nothing."