nine o'clock
`` Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this morning before breakfast . '' Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward heaviness of the past twenty-four hours which had quenched the vitality of youth in her without substituting the philosophy of maturer years , and she resolved to go out and walk a little way . So when breakfast was over , she put on her bonnet , and took a direction towards the church . It was nine o'clock , and the men having returned to work again from their first meal , she was not likely to meet many of them in the road . Knowing that Fanny had been laid in the reprobates ' quarter of the graveyard , called in the parish `` behind church , '' which was invisible from the road , it was impossible to resist the impulse to enter and look upon a spot which , from nameless feelings , she at the same time dreaded to see . She had been unable to overcome an impression that some connection existed between her rival and the light through the trees . Bathsheba skirted the buttress , and beheld the hole and the tomb , its delicately veined surface splashed and stained just as Troy had seen it and left it two hours earlier .