In the village there is an amateur photographer, William Dare, the illegitimate son of Captain De Stancy, an impoverished scion of that family.

In revenge, Dare burns down the castle using his family's portraits and furniture as kindling; Somerset proposes to build a modern house in its place.

The last line has Paula summing up her dichotomy of mind between modernity and romantic medievalism, and thus the two men, also emphasising the title "a Laodicean" (someone indifferent or half-hearted) — "I wish my castle wasn't burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy!"

The usage of "Laodicean" to mean someone lacking commitment comes from a reference in the New Testament: To the angel of the church in Laodicaea write: — "These are the words of the Unchanging One, 'the witness faithful and true, the beginning of the Creation of God': —I know your life; I know that you are neither cold nor hot.

"In his 1910 Essays on Modern Novelists, American critic and scholar William Lyon Phelps, wrote: No one of Mr Hardy's novels contain more of the facts of his own life than A Laodicean, which was composed on what the author then believed to be his death bed; it was mainly dictated, which I think partly accounts for its difference in style from the other tales... Not only does Mr Hardy's scientific profession speak through the mouths of his characters, but old and beautiful buildings adorn his pages as they do the landscape he loves.