From this point on in Book Fifth, the novel is, in a sense, all plot. The time for speaking is past. Eustacia's hovering around the pistols in Captain Vye's bedroom the day she returns there is an even stronger foreshadowing of her eventual suicide than we have seen before. The stronger the foreshadowing of an event in a novel, the nearer it is to taking place.
Charley's hiding the pistols in the stable is not likely to stop Eustacia from destroying herself. The conversation with Wildeve is in somewhat the same spirit: in effect, they speak to each other in the past tense, though they are talking about the immediate future. It is too late for Wildeve to offer anything. Though he is shown not to realize this, he is, after all, an opportunist from first to last in the story Eustacia does, though she goes through the motions of making plans with him.
The futility of her taking any action except what we have come to see as inevitable is shown in the fact that the story is back where it began, the Fifth of November. If anything, Eustacia has a worse opinion of herself than she did in the beginning: "her state was so hopeless that she could play with it." From this point on, she moves without animation, Hardy showing her to be in the grip of the Destiny she has often referred to.
