She was a misty shape, and well she might be, considering that her original was at that moment sound asleep and oblivious of all love and letter-writing under the sky.
Whenever Boldwood dozed she took a form, and comparatively ceased to be a vision: when he awoke there was the letter justifying the dream.
The moon shone to-night, and its light was not of a customary kind.
His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen had that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in strange places, and putting lights where shadows had used to be.
The substance of the epistle had occupied him but little in comparison with the fact of its arrival.

He suddenly wondered if anything more might be found in the envelope than what he had withdrawn.

He jumped out of bed in the weird light, took the letter, pulled out the flimsy sheet, shook the envelope--searched it.
Nothing more was there.

Boldwood looked, as he had a hundred times the preceding day, at the insistent red seal: "Marry me," he said aloud.
The solemn and reserved yeoman again closed the letter, and stuck it in the frame of the glass.

In doing so he caught sight of his reflected features, wan in expression, and insubstantial in form.
He saw how closely compressed was his mouth, and that his eyes were wide-spread and vacant.