The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fe… - Thomas Hardy

She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind — or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.

Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

Two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience