In keeping with the terrain, her heart "had learnt of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love."
Angel, meanwhile, briefly dallies with one of the other milkmaids, Izz Huett, inviting her to join him on his journey to Brazil, while warning that she "is not to trust me in morals now." He rescinds the invitation when Izz reminds him of how much Tess adored him.
Wandering alone, Tess exhibits "something of the habilitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting automatism with which she rambled on -- disconnecting herself little by little from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity."
On the road, Tess meets the man Angel had fought on her behalf and escapes from him by running into a preserve and making a "nest."
She sleeps overnight on the bare ground, disturbed by a sound of fluttering. On awakening, she finds that she is surrounded by wounded pheasants.
"Under the trees, several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly moving their wings, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating feebly, some contorted, some stretched out -- all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of Nature to bear more.
"Tess guessed at the meaning of this. The birds had been driven down into this corner the day before by some shooting party" . . . "She had occasionally caught sight of these men in girlhood, looking over hedges or peering through bushes, and pointing their guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthisty light in their eyes. She had been told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not like this all the year around, but were, in fact, quite civil persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter . . . when [they] made it their purpose to destroy life."
Hoping to avoid further run-ins with men -- and perhaps drawing a lesson from the fate of the richly-plumaged pheasants -- Tess wears her worst clothes and cuts away her lush eyebrows.
Tess finds lowly work at a dismal farm at the aptly named Flintcomb Ash. She digs the lower halves of swede (turnips) from the ground, the tops and leaves having already been chewed away by livestock. The farm turns out to be owned by the same man who chased her into the park: Farmer Groby.
Increasingly distraught, Tess determines to visit Angel's parents, but after a long cross-country trek shrinks from her goal after overhearing a conversation among his brothers that, she believes, indicates how the family thinks of her.
Heading back to the turnip farm, Tess encounters a Ranter preaching a sermon. The Ranter is the reformed rake Alec D'urberville and in his audience is the man who paints biblical slogans along the roadside.
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