Page:Far from the Madding Crowd Vol 1.djvu/313

 latterly has not been often (my mother was a Parisienne)—and there's a proverb they have, 'Qui aime bien, châtie bien'—'He chastens who loves well.' Do you understand me?"

"Ah!" she replied, and there was even a little tremulousness in the usually cool girl's voice; "if you can only fight half as winningly as you can talk, you are able to make a pleasure of a bayonet wound!" And then poor Bathsheba instantly perceived her slip in making this admission in hastily trying to retrieve it, she went from bad to worse. Don't, however, suppose that I derive any pleasure from what you tell me."

"I know you do not—I know it perfectly," said Troy, with much hearty conviction on the exterior of his face and altering the expression to moodiness; "when a dozen men are ready to speak tenderly to you, and give the admiration you deserve without adding the warning you need, it stands to reason that my poor rough-and-ready mixture of praise and blame cannot convey much pleasure. Fool as I may be, I am not so conceited as to suppose that."

"I think you—are conceited, nevertheless," said Bathsheba, hesitatingly, and looking askance at a reed she was fitfully pulling with one hand, having lately grown feverish under the soldier's system of procedure—not because the nature