Far from the Madding Crowd the baby. Mother and child are then placed in a coffin and sent home to Weatherbury for interment. Gabriel, who has long known of Troy's relationship with Fanny, tries to conceal the child's existence – but Bathsheba agrees that the coffin can be left in her house overnight, from her sense of duty towards a former servant of the household. Her new servant, Liddy, repeats the rumour that Fanny had a child; when all the servants are in bed, Bathsheba unscrews the lid and sees the two bodies inside. Troy then comes home from Casterbridge, where he had gone to
Far from the Madding Crowd ask once again for her hand in marriage. She accepts, and the two are quietly married. Hardy took the title from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"<br> "Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray";<br> "Along the cool sequester'd vale of life"<br> "They kept the noiseless tenor of their way". "Madding" here means "frenzied". Lucasta Miller points out that the title is an ironic literary joke as Gray is idealising the noiselessness and sequestered calm whereas Hardy "disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of