Gabriel sheared on, constrained and sad.
She left Boldwood's side, and he walked up and down alone for nearly a quarter of an hour.

Then she reappeared in her new riding-habit of myrtle green, which fitted her to the waist as a rind fits its fruit; and young Bob Coggan led on her mare, Boldwood fetching his own horse from the tree under which it had been tied.
Oak's eyes could not forsake them; and in endeavouring to continue his shearing at the same time that he watched Boldwood's manner, he snipped the sheep in the groin.

The animal plunged; Bathsheba instantly gazed towards it, and saw the blood.
"Oh, Gabriel!" she exclaimed, with severe remonstrance, "you who are so strict with the other men--see what you are doing yourself!" To an outsider there was not much to complain of in this remark; but to Oak, who knew Bathsheba to be well aware that she herself was the cause of the poor ewe's wound, because she had wounded the ewe's shearer in a still more vital part, it had a sting which the abiding sense of his inferiority to both herself and Boldwood was not calculated to heal.

But a manly resolve to recognize boldly that he had no longer a lover's interest in her, helped him occasionally to conceal a feeling.
"Bottle!" he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine.

Cainy Ball ran up, the wound was anointed, and the shearing continued.
Boldwood gently tossed Bathsheba into the saddle, and before they turned away she again spoke out to Oak with the same dominative and tantalizing graciousness.
"I am going now to see Mr.Boldwood's Leicesters.