 22 The sunny, leafy week which followed the tender doings of Midsomer Eve brought a visitor to Fitzpiers's door. A voice that he knew sounded in the passage. Mr. Melbury had called. At first he had a particular objection to enter the parlour, because his boots were dusty, but as the surgeon insisted he waved the point and came in. Looking neither to the right or to the left, hardly at Fitzpiers himself, he put his hat under his chair, and with a preoccupied gaze at the floor, he said, I have called to ask you, doctor, quite privately, a question that troubles me. I have a daughter, Grace, an only daughter, as you may have heard. Well, she's been out in the dew, on Midsomer Eve in particular, she went out in tin slippers to watch some vagary of the Hintock maids, and she's got a cough, a distinct hemming and hacking, that makes me uneasy. Now I have decided to send her away, to some seaside place for a change. Send her away? Fitzpiers's countenance had fallen. Yes, and the question is, where would you advise me to send her? The timber merchant had happened to call at a moment when Fitzpiers was at the spring tide of a sentiment that Grace was a necessity of his existence. The sudden pressure of her form upon his breast as she came headlong round the bush had never ceased to linger with him, ever since he adopted a manoeuvre for which the hour and the moonlight and the occasion had been the only excuse. Now she was to be sent away. Ambition! Could it be postponed? Family! Culture and reciprocity of tastes had taken the place of family nowadays. He allowed himself to be carried forward on the wave of his desire. How strange! How very strange it is, he said, that you should have come to me about her just now. I have been thinking every day of coming to you on the very same errant. Ah! You have noticed too that our health. I have noticed nothing the matter with our health. As there is nothing. But, Mr. Melbury, I have seen your daughter several times by accident. I have admired her infinitely, and I was coming to ask you if I may become better acquainted with her, and pay my addresses to her. Melbury was looking down as he listened, and did not see the air of half-miss-giving at his own rashness, that spread over Fitzpiers's face as he made this declaration. You have got to know her, said Melbury, a spell of dead silence having preceded his utterance, during which his emotion rose with almost visible effect. Yes, said Fitzpiers, and you wish to become better acquainted with her. You mean with a view to marriage? Of course, that is what you mean. Yes, said the young man. I mean, get acquainted with her, with a view to being her accepted lover, and if we suit each other, what would naturally follow? The timber-merchant was much surprised, and fairly agitated. His hand trembled as he laid by his walking-stick. This takes me unawares, he said, his voice well-knigh breaking down. I don't mean that there is anything unexpected in a gentleman being attracted by her, but it did not occur to me it would be you. I always said, continued he, with a lump in his throat, that my grace would make a mark at her own level some day. That's why I educated her. I said to myself, I'll do it, cost what it may. Though her mother-law was pretty frightened at my paying out so much money year after year, I knew it would tell in the end. The way you've not got good material to work on such doings would be a waste and vanity, I said, but when you have that material it is sure to be worthwhile. I am glad you don't object, said Fitzpiers, almost wishing that grace had not been quite so cheap for him. If she's willing, I don't object certainly. Indeed, either the honest man, it would be a deceit if I were to pretend to feel anything else than highly honoured personally, and it is a great credit to her to have drawn to her a man of such good professional, station, and venerable old family. That huntsman fellow, little Todd, how long he was about her. Take her, and welcome, sir. I'll endeavour to ascertain her mind. Yes, yes, but she will be agreeable, I should think, as she ought to be. I hope she may. Well, now you'll expect to see me frequently. Oh, yes, but name it all, about her cough, and her going away, I had quite forgotten that that was what I came about. I assure you, said the surgeon, that her cough can only be the result of a slight cold, and it is not necessary to banish her to any seaside place at all. The Melbury looked unconvinced, doubting whether he ought to take Fitzpears's professional opinion and circumstances which naturally led him to wish to keep her there. The doctor saw this, and honestly dreading to lose sight of her, he said eagerly, "'Between ourselves, if I am successful with her, I will take her away myself for a month or two, as soon as we are married, which I hope will be before the chilly weather comes on. This will be so very much better than letting her go now.' The proposal pleased Melbury much. There could hardly be any danger in postponing any desirable change of air, as long as the warm weather lasted, and for such a reason. Suddenly recollecting himself, he said, "'Your time must be precious, doctor. I'll get home along. I am much obliged to you. As you will see her off, and you'll discover for yourself, if anything serious is the matter.' "'I can assure you it is nothing,' said Fitzpears, who had seen greats much oftener already than her father knew of. When he was gone Fitzpears paused, silent, registering his sensations, like a man who has made a plunge for a pearl into a medium of which he knows not the density or temperature. But he had done it, and Grace was the sweetest girl alive. As for the departed visitor, his own last words lingered in Melbury's ears as he walked homeward. He felt that what he had said in the emotion of the moment was very stupid, un-genteal, and unsuited to a dialogue, with an educated gentleman. The smallness of whose practice was more than compensated by the former greatness of his family. He had uttered thoughts before they were weighed, and almost before they were shaped. They had expressed a certain sense of his feeling at Fitzpears's news, but yet they were not right. Looking on the ground and planting his stick at each tread, as if it were a flag-staff, he reached his own precincts, whereas he passed through the court he automatically stopped to look at the men working in the shed and around. One of them asked him a question about wagon-spokes. "'Hey,' said Melbury, looking hard at him, the man repeated his words. Melbury stood, then turning suddenly away without answering. He went up the court and entered the house. As time was no object with the journeymen, except as a thing to get past, they leisurely surveyed the door through which he had disappeared. "'What, Maggot, as the gaffer got in his head now?' said Tang's the elder. "'It's something to do with that child of his. When you've got to made your own, John up, John, that cost you what she cost him. That'll take the streak out of your Sunday shoes, John. But you'll never be tall enough to accomplish such as she. And is it a lucky thing for you, John, as things be? Well, he ought to have a dozen, and that'd bring him to reason. I see him walking together last Sunday, and when he came to a puddle, he lifted her over like a hape in the dahl. He ought to have a dozen. He'd let him walk through puddles for himself's den. Meanwhile, Melbury had entered the house with the look of a man who sees a vision before him. His wife was in the room. Without taking off his hat, he sat down at random. "'Loose, we've done it,' he said. "'Yes, the thing is as I expected. The spell that I first saw might be worked has worked. She's done it and done it well. Where is she? Grace, I mean.' "'Open her room. What has happened?' Mr. Melbury explained the circumstances as coherently as he could. They told you so?' He said. "'A maid like her couldn't stay hid long, even in a place like this. But where is Grace? Let's have her down. Here. Grace?' She appeared after a reasonable interval, for she was sufficiently spoiled by this father of hers, not to put herself in a hurry, however impatient his tones. "'What is it, father?' she said, with a smile. "'Why, you scamp, what's this you've been doing? Not home here more than six months, yet instead of confining yourself to your father's rank, making havoc in the educated classes?' Though accustomed to show herself instantly appreciative of her father's meanings, Grace was fairly unable to look anyhow but at a loss now. "'No. No, of course you don't know what I mean. Her pretence you don't, though for my part I believe women can see these things through a double hedge, but I suppose I must tell you, why, you've flung your grapnel over the doctor, and he's come and caught and fought with.' "'Only think of that, my dear. Don't you feel it a triumph?' said Mrs. Melbury. "'Come in courting. I've done nothing to make him,' Grace exclaimed. It was unnecessary that you should, to his voluntary to rule these things. Well, he has behaved very honourably and asked my consent. You know what to do when he gets here, I dare say, I needn't tell you to make it all smooth for him. You mean to lead him on to marry me?' "'I do. Haven't I educated you for it?' Grace looked out of the window, and at the fireplace with no animation in her face. Why has it settled offhand this way?' She said, coquettishly. "'You'll wait to hear what I think of him, I suppose?' "'Oh, yes, of course. But you see what a good thing it will be.' She weighed the statement without speaking. "'You will be restored to the society you've been taken away from,' continued her father, for I don't suppose he'll stay here long.' He admitted the advantage, but it was plain that though Fitzpill had exercised a certain fascination over her when he was present, or even more an almost psychic influence, and though his impulsive act in the wood had stirred her feelings indescribably, she had never regarded him in the light of a destined husband. "'I don't know what to answer,' she said. "'I have learned that he is very clever. He's all right, and he's coming here to see you.' A premonition that she could not resist him if he came strangely moved her. "'Of course, Father, you remember that it is only lately that Giles—' "'You know that you can't think of him. He has given up all claim to you.' She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as he could state his opinion, though she had skill in speech, and her father had none. That Fitzpill's acted upon her like a dram, exciting her, throwing her into a novel atmosphere which biased her doings until the influence was over, when she felt something of the nature of regret for the mood she had experienced. Still more, if she reflected on the silent, almost sarcastic criticism apparent in Winterborne's air towards her, could not be told to this worthy couple in words. It so happened that on this very day Fitzpill's was called away from Hintock by an engagement to attend some medical meetings, and his visits, therefore, did not begin at once. A note, however, arrived from him addressed to Grace, deploring his enforced absence. As a material object, this note was pretty and super-fine—a note of a sort that she had been unaccustomed to see since her return to Hintock, except when a school-friend wrote to her, a rare instance for the girls were respectors of persons, and many cooled down towards the timber-dealer's daughter when she was out of sight. Thus the receipt of it pleased her, and she afterwards walked about with a reflective air. In the evening her father, who knew that the note had come, said, Why be he not sitting down to answer your letter? That's what young folks did in my time. She replied that it did not require an answer. No, you know best, he said. Nevertheless, he went on about his business, doubting if she were right in not replying, and possibly she might be so mismanaging matters as to risk the loss of an alliance which would bring her much happiness. Melbury's respect for Fitzpiers was based less on his professional position, which was not much, than the standing of his family in the county in bygone days. That implicit faith in members of long-established families as such irrespective of their personal condition or character, which is still found among old-fashioned people in the rural districts, reached its full intensity in Melbury. His daughter, Souter, was descended from a family he had heard of in his grandfather's time as being once great, a family which had conferred its name upon a neighbouring village. How then could anything be amiss in this betrothal? I must keep her up to this, he said to his wife. She sees it as for her happiness, but she is young, and may want a little prompting from an older tongue. CHAPTER XXIII With this in view he took her out for a walk, a custom of his when he wished to say anything especially impressive. Their way was over the top of that lofty ridge dividing their woodland from the cider-district, whence they had in the spring beheld the miles of apple-trees and bloom. All was now deep green. The spot recalled to Grace's mind the last occasion of her presence there, and she said, The promise of an enormous apple-crop is fulfilling itself, is it not? I suppose Giles is getting his mills and presses ready. This was just what her father had not come here to talk about. Without replying he raised his arm and built his finger till he fixed it at a point. There, he said, you see that plantation reaching over the hill like a great slug, and just behind the hill a particularly green sheltered bottom. That's where Mr. Fitzpiers's family were lords of the manner for, I don't know how many hundred years, and there stands the village of Buckbury Fitzpiers, a wonderful property who was wonderful. But they are not lords of the manner there now. Why, no, but good and great things die as well as little and foolish. The only ones representing the family now, I believe, are our doctor and a maiden lady living I don't know where. You can't help being happy Grace in allying yourself with such a romantical family. You'll feel as if you've stepped into history. We've been at Hintock as long as they've been at Buckbury. Is it not so? You say our name occurs in old deeds continually. Oh, yes, as yeoman, copy-holders, and such like, don't think how much better this will be for ye. You'll be living a high intellectual life, such as has now become natural to ye, and though the doctor's practice is small here, he'll no doubt go to a dash in town when he's got his hand in, and keep a stylish carriage, and you'll be brought to know a good many ladies of excellent society. If ye should ever meet me then, Grace, ye can drive past me, looking the other way. I shouldn't expect ye to speak to me, or wish such a thing, unless it happened to be in some lonely, private place where it wouldn't lorry at all. Don't think such men as neighbour Giles are equal. He and I should be good friends enough, but he's not for the like of you. He's lived a rough and homely life here, and his wise life must be rough and homely, likewise. Such pressure could not but produce some displacement. As Grace was left very much to herself, she took advantage of one fine day before Fitzpiers's return to drive to the aforesaid Vale, where stood the village of Buckbury Fitzpiers. Leaving her father's man at the inn, with the horse and gig, she rambled onward to the ruins of a castle, which stood in a field hard by. She had no doubt that it represented the ancient stronghold of the Fitzpiers family. The remains were few, and consisted mostly of remnants of the lower vaulting, supported on low stout columns surmounted by the crochet capital of the period. The two or three arches of these vaults that were still in position were utilised by the adjoining farmer as shelter for his calves, the floor being spread with straw, amid which the young creatures rustled, cooling their thirsty tongues by licking the quaint Norman carving, which glistened with a moisture. It was a degradation of even such a rude form of art as this to be treated so grossly, she thought, and for the first time the family of Fitzpiers assumed in her imagination the hues of a melancholy romanticism. It was soon time to drive home, and she traversed a distance with a preoccupied mind. The idea of so modern a man in science and aesthetics as the young surgeon, springing out of relics so ancient, was a kind of novelty she had never before experienced. The combination lent him a social and intellectual interest, which she dreaded, so much weight to the dad, to the strange influence he exercised upon her whenever he came near her. In an excitement which was not love, not ambition, rather a fearful consciousness of hazard in the air, she awaited his return. Meanwhile her father was awaiting him also. In his house there was an old work on medicine, published towards the end of the last century, and to put himself in harmony with events, Melbury spread this work on his knees when he had done his day's business, and read about galleon, apocrytase, and herophilus. Of the dogmatic, the empiric, the hermetical, and other sects of practitioners that have arisen in history, and thence proceeded to the classification of maladies and the rules for their treatment, as laid down in this valuable book with absolute precision. Melbury regretted that the treaties were so old, fearing that he might in consequence be unable to hold a complete conversation as he could with Mr. Fitzpiers, primed no doubt with more recent discoveries. The day of Fitzpiers's return arrived, and he sent to say that he would call immediately. In the little time that was afforded for putting the house in order, the sweeping of Melbury's parlour was as the sweeping of the parlour at the interpreters, which well night choked the pilgrim. At the end of it Mrs. Melbury sat down, folded her hands and lips and waited. Her husband, restlessly walked in and out from the timber-yard, stared at the interior of the room, jerked out, eye, eye, and retreated again. Between four and five Fitzpiers arrived, hitching his horse to the hook outside the door. As soon as he had walked in and perceived that Grace was not in the room, he seemed to have a misgiving. Nothing less than her actual presence could long keep him to the level of this impassioned enterprise, and that lacking he appeared as one who wished to retrace his steps. He mechanically talked at what he considered a woodland-matron's level of thought, till a rustling was heard on the stairs and Grace came in. Fitzpiers was for once as agitated as she. Over and above the genuine emotion which he raised in his heart, there hung the sense that he was casting a die by impulse, which he might not have thrown by judgment. Mr. Melbury was not in the room. Having to attend to matters in the yard he had delayed putting on his afternoon coat and waistcoat till the doctor's appearance, when not wishing to be backward in receiving him, he entered the parlour hastily buttoning up those garments. Grace's facidiousness was a little distressed that Fitzpiers should see by this action the strain his visit was putting upon her father. And to make matters worse for her just then, old grammar seemed to have a passion for incessantly pumping in the back kitchen, leaving the doors open so that the banging and splashing were distinct above the parlour conversation. Whenever the chat over tea sank into pleasant desolatareness, Mr. Melbury broke in with speeches of laboured precision on very remote topics, as if he feared to let Fitzpiers's mind dwell critically on the subject nearest to the hearts of all. In truth a constrained manner was natural enough in Melbury just now, for the greatest interest of his life was reaching its crisis. Could the real have been beheld instead of the cuporial merely, the corner of the room in which he sat would have been filled with a form typical of anxious suspense, large-eyed, tight-lipped, awaiting the issue? That paternal hope of fear so intense should be bound up in the person of one child so peculiarly circumstanced, and not have dispersed themselves over the larger field of a whole family involved dangerous risks to future happiness. Fitzpiers did not stay more than an hour, but that time had apparently advanced his sentiments towards Grace, once and for all, from a vaguely liquecent to an organic shape. She would not have accompanied him to the door in response to his whispered, Come! If her mother had not said in a matter-of-fact way. Of course, Grace, go to the door with Mr. Fitzpiers. Grace accordingly went, both her parents remaining in the room. When the young pair were in the great brick-floored hall, the lover took the girl's hand in his, and drew it under his arm, and thus led her on to the door, where he stealthily kissed her. She broke from him, trembling, blushed and turned aside, hardly knowing how things had advanced to this. Fitzpiers drove off, kissing his hand to her, and waving it to Melbury, who was visible through the window. Her father returned the surgeon's actions with a great flourish of his own hand, and a satisfied smile. The intoxication that Fitzpiers had, as usual produced in Grace's brain during the visit, passed off somewhat with his withdrawal. She felt like a woman who did not know what she had been doing for the previous hour, but suppose with trepidation that the afternoon's proceedings, though vague, had amounted to an engagement between herself and the handsome, coercive, irresistible Fitzpiers. This visit was a type of many which followed it during the long summer days of that year. Grace was born along upon a stream of reasonings, arguments and persuasions, supplemented, it must be added, by inclinations of her own at times. No woman is without aspirations, which may be innocent enough within certain limits, and Grace had been so trained socially and educated intellectually, as to see clearly enough a pleasure in the position of a wife to such a man as Fitzpiers. His material standing of itself, either present or future, had little in it to give her ambition, but the possibilities of a refined and cultivated inner life, of subtle psychological intercourse, had their charm. It was this rather than any vulgar idea of marrying well which caused her to float with a current, and to yield to the immense influence which Fitzpiers exercised over her whenever she shared his society. Any observer would shrewdly have prophesised that whether or not she loved him as yet, in the ordinary sense, as she was pretty sure to do so in time. One evening just before dusk they had taken a rather long walk together, and for a short cut homeward passed through the shrubberies of Hintock House, still deserted, and still blankly confronting with sightless shuttered windows the surrounding foliage and slopes. Grace was tired, and they approached the wall and sat together on one of the stone sails, still warm with the sun that had been pouring its rays upon them all the afternoon. This place would just do for us, would it not, dearest? said her betrothed as they sat, turning and looking idly at the old façade. Oh, yes, said Grace, plainly showing that no such fancy had ever crossed her mind. She is away from home still. Grace added in a minute, rather sadly, for she could not forget that she had somehow lost the valuable friendship of the lady of this bower. Who is—oh, you mean Mrs. Charmond, do you know, dear, that at one time I thought you lived here? Indeed, said Grace, how was that? He explained as far as he could do so without mentioning his disappointment at finding it was otherwise, and then went on. Well, never mind that. Now I want to ask you something. There is one detail of our wedding which I am sure you will leave to me. My inclination is not to be married at that horrid little church here, with all the yokel staring round at us in a droning parson reading. Where, then, can it be, at a church in town? No, not at a church at all, at a registry office. It is a quieter, snugger, and more convenient place in every way. Oh! she said with real distress, how can I be married except at church, and with all my dear friends round me? Yom and Winterborn among them? Yes, why not? You know there was nothing serious between him and me? You see, dear, a noisy bell-ringing marriage at church has this objection in our case. It would be a thing of a port a long way around. Now I would gently, as gently as possible, indicate to you how inadvisable such publicity would be if we leave Hintock and I purchase the practice that I contemplate purchasing at Budmouth, hardly more than twenty miles off. Forgive my saying that it would be far better if nobody knows where you come from, nor anything about your parents. Your beauty and knowledge and manners will carry you anywhere if you are not hampered by such retrospective criticism. But could it not be a quiet ceremony, even at church? She pleaded. I don't see the necessity of going there. He said it trifle impatiently. Marriage is a civil contract, and the shorter and simpler it is made, the better, and people don't go to church when they take a house, or even when they make a will. Oh, Edgar, I don't like to hear you speak like that. Well, I didn't mean to, but I have mentioned as much to your father who has made no objection, and why should you? She gave way, deeming the point one on which she ought to allow sentiment to give way to policy, if there were indeed policy in his plan, but she was indefinably depressed as they walked homeward. He left her at the door of her father's house. As he receded, and was classed out of sight by the filmy shades, he impressed Grace as a man who hardly appertained her existence at all. Cleverer, greater than herself, won outside her mental orbit, as she considered him, he seemed to be her ruler rather than her equal, protector, and dear familiar friend. The disappointment she had experienced at his wish, the shock given to her girlish sensibilities by his irreverent views of marriage, together with a sure and near approach of the day, fixed for committing her future to his keeping, made her so restless that she could scarcely sleep at all that night. She rose when the sparrows began to walk out of the roof-holes, sat on the floor of her room in the dim light, and by and by peeped out behind the window-curtains. It was even now day out of doors, though the tones of morning were feeble and wan, and it was long before the sun would be perceptible in this overshadowed veil. Not a sound came from the outhouses as yet. The tree-trunks, the road, the outbuildings, the garden, every object wore an aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness, and meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively contrasting with their own active emotions. Beyond the road were some cottage-roofs and orchards. Over these roofs and over the apple-trees behind, high up the slope and backed by the plantation on the crest, was the house yet occupied by her future husband, the roughcast front showing whitely through its creepers. The window-shutters were closed, the bedroom-curtains closely drawn, and not the tinnest coil of smoke rose from the rugged chimneys. Something broke the stillness. The front door of the house she was gazing at opened softly, and there came out into the porch a female figure, wrapped in a large shawl, beneath which was visible the white skirts of a long loose garment. A grey arm stretching from within the porch adjusted the shawl over the woman's shoulders. It was withdrawn and disappeared, the door closing behind her. The woman went quickly down the box-edged path between the raspberries and currents, and as she walked her well-developed form and gait betrayed her individuality. It was Suki Damson, the affianced one of simple young Tim Tangs. At the bottom of the garden she entered the shelter of a tall hedge, and only the top of her head could be seen hastening in the direction of her own dwelling. Grace had recognized, or thought she recognized, in the grey arm stretching from the porch, the sleeve of a dressing-gown which Mr. Fitzpiers had been wearing on her own memorable visit to him. Her face fired red. She had just before thought of dressing herself and taking a lonely walk under the trees so coolly green this early morning, but she now sat down on her bed and fell into reverie. It seemed as if hardly any time had passed when she heard the household moving briskly about, and breakfast preparing downstairs, though unrousing herself to robe and descend. She found that the sun was throwing his rays completely over the treetops, a progress of natural phenomena denoting that at least three hours had elapsed since she last looked out of her window. When attired she searched about the house for her father. She found him at last in the garden, stooping to examine the potatoes for signs of disease. Hearing her rustle he stood up and stretched his back and arms, saying, Born unto you, Gracie, I congratulate ye, it is only a month to-day to the time. She did not answer, but without lifting her dress waded between the dewy rows of tall potato-green into the middle of the plot where he was. I've been thinking very much about my position this morning, ever since it was light. She began excitedly and trembling so that she could hardly stand. And I feel it is a false one. I wish not to marry Mr. Fitzpiers. I wish not to marry anybody, but I'll marry Giles Winterborne if you say I must as an alternative. Her father's face settled into rigidity. He turned pale and came deliberately out of the plot before he answered her. She had never seen him look so incensed before. Now, hearken to me, he said. There's a time for a woman to alter a mind, and there's a time when she can no longer alter it, if she has any right eye to her parents' honour and the seemliness of things. That time has come. I won't say to you you shall marry him, but I will say that if you refuse I shall forever be ashamed and wary of you as a daughter, and shall look upon you as the hope of my life no more. What do you know about life, and what it can bring forth, and how you ought to act to lead up to best ends? Oh, you are an ungrateful maid-grace. You've seen that fellow Giles, and he's got over you. That's where the secret lies all warrant me. No, Father, no. It is not Giles. It is something I cannot tell you of. Well, make fools of us all. Make us all laugh and stalks. Break it off. Have your own way. But who knows of the engagement as yet? How can breaking it disgrace you? Melbury then, by degrees, admitted that he had mentioned the engagement to this acquaintance and to that till she perceived that in his restlessness and pride he had published it everywhere. She went dismally away to a bower of laurel at the top of the garden. Her father followed her. It is that Giles winter-born, he said, with an up-braiding gaze at her. No, it is not. And though for that matter you encouraged him once, she said, troubled to the verge of despair, it is not Giles, it is Mr. Fitzpiers. You have had a tiff. A lover's tiff. It is all, I suppose. It is some woman. Aye, aye, you are jealous, the old story. Don't tell me. Now, do you buy it here? I'll send Fitzpiers to you. I saw him smoking in front of his house, but a minute by gone. He went off hastily out of the garden-gate and down the lane. But she would not stay where she was. And edging through a slit in the garden-fence, walked away into the wood. Just about here the trees were large and wide apart, and there was no undergrowth so that she could be seen to some distance, a silt-like, greenish-white creature, as toned by the sunlight and leafage. She heard a footfall crushing dead leaves behind her, and found herself reconnoitred by Fitzpiers himself, approaching gay and fresh as the morning around them. His remote gaze at her had been one of mild interest rather than a rapture. She looked so lovely in the green world about her, her pink cheeks, her simple light dress, and the delicate flexibility of her movement, acquired such rarity from the wildwood setting that his eyes kindled as he drew near. My darling, what is it? Your father says you were in the pouts and jealous, and I don't know what. Ah! As if there were any rival to you except vegetable nature in this home of recluses, and we know better. Jealous? Oh, no, it is not so, she said gravely. That's a mistake of his and yours, sir. I spoke to him so closely about the question of marriage with you that he did not apprehend my state of mind. But there's something wrong, eh? He asked, eyeing her narrowly and bending to kiss her. She shrank away, and his proposed kiss miscarried. What is it, he said more seriously for this little defeat? She made no answer beyond. As if it appears, I have had no breakfast, I must go in. Come, he insisted, fixing his eyes upon her. Tell me at once, I say. It was the greater strength against the smaller, but she was mastered less by his manner than by her own sense of the unfairness of silence. I looked out of the window, she said with hesitation. I'll tell you by and by. I must go indoors, I have had no breakfast. By a sort of divination his conjecture went straight to the fact. Nor I, he said lightly, indeed I rose late to-day. I have had a broken night, her brother mourning. A girl of the village, I don't know her name, came and rang at my bell as soon as it was light, between four and five I should think it was—perfectly maddened with an aching tooth. As nobody heard her ring she threw some gravel at my window, till at last I heard her and slipped on my dressing-gown and went down. The poor thing begged me with tears in her eyes to take out her tormentor, if I dragged her head off. Down she sat and out it came, a lovely molar, not a speck upon it, and off she went with it in her handkerchief, much contented, though it would have done good work for her for fifty years to come. It was all so plausible, so completely explained. Seeing nothing of the incident in the wood on old Midsomer's eve, Grace felt that her suspicions were unworthy and absurd, and with the readiness of an honest heart she jumped at the opportunity of honouring his word. At the moment of her mental liberation the bushes about the garden had moved, and her father emerged into the shady glade. Well, I hope it's made up, he said cheerily. Oh, yes, said Fitzpiers, with his eyes fixed on Grace, whose eyes were shyly bent downward. Now, said her father, tell me the pair of you that you still mean to take one another for good in all, and on the strength of it you shall have another couple of hundred paid down. I swear it by the name. Fitzpiers took her hand. We declare it, do we not, my dear Grace, he said. Relieved of her doubt, somewhat over-odd and ever anxious to please, she was disposed to settle the matter, yet woman-like she would not relinquish her opportunity of asking a concession of some sort. If our wedding can be at church, I say yes. She answered in a measured voice. If not, I say no. Fitzpiers was generous in his turn. It shall be so, he rejoined gracefully. To holy church we go, and much good may it do us. They returned through the bushes indoors, grace-walking full of thought between the other two, somewhat comforted, both by Fitzpiers's ingenious explanation, and by the sense that she was not to be deprived of her religious ceremony. So let it be, she said to herself, pre-god, it is for the best. From this hour there was no serious attempt at recalcitration on her part. Fitzpiers kept himself continually near her, dominating any rebellious impulse, and shaping her will into passive concurrence with all his desires. Apart from his lover-like anxiety to possess her, the few golden hundreds of the timber-dealers, ready to hand, formed a warm background to Grace's lovely face, and went some way to remove his uneasiness at the prospect of endangering his professional and social chances by an alliance with the family of a simple countryman. The interim closed up its perspective surely and silently. However Grace had any doubts of her position, the sense of contracting time was like a shortening chamber. At other moments she was comparatively blithe. Day after day waxed and waned. The one or two woodmen who sawed, shaped, spoke-shaved on her father's premises at this inactive season of the year, regularly came and unlocked the doors in the morning, locked them in the evening, jumped, leaned over their garden gates for a whiff of evening air, and to catch any last and farthest throb of news from the outer world which entered and expired at little Hintock, like the exhausted swell of a wave in some innermost cavern, of some innermost creek of an unbaid sea. Yet no news interfered with the nuptial purpose at their neighbor's house. The sappy green twig-tips of the season's growth would not, she thought, be appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the time. The tints of the foliage would hardly have changed. Everything was so much as usual that no itinerant stranger would have supposed a woman's fate to be hanging in the balance at that summer's decline. But there were preparations, imaginable readily enough by those who had special knowledge. In the remote and fashionable town of Sanborn something was growing up under the hands of several persons who had never seen Grace Melbury, never would see her, or care anything about her at all, though their creation had such interesting relation to her life that it would enclose her very heart at a moment when that heart would beat, if not with more emotional ardour, at least with more emotional turbulence than at any previous time. Why did Mrs. Dollery's van, instead of passing along at the end of the smaller village to Great Hintock Direct, turn one Saturday night into Little Hintock Lane, and never pull up till it reached Mr. Melbury's gates? The gilding shine of evening fell upon a large flat box, not less than the yard's square, and safely tied with cord, as it was handed out from under the tilt with a great deal of care. But it was not heavy for its size. Mrs. Dollery herself carried it into the house. Some tangs, the hollow-turner, bar-tree, suki-dams, and others, looked knowing, and made remarks to each other as they watched its entrance. Melbury stood at the door of the timber-shed in the attitude of a man to whom such an arrival was a trifling domestic detail, with which he did not condescend to be concerned. Yet he well devined the contents of that box, and was in truth all the while in a pleasant exaltation, at the proof that thus far, at any rate, no disappointment had supervened. While Mrs. Dollery remained, which was rather long, from her sense of the importance of her errand, he went into the out-house. But as soon as she had had her say, been paid, and had rumbled away, he entered the dwelling, to find there what he knew he should find. His wife and daughter in a flutter of excitement over the wedding-gown, just arrived from the leading dress-maker of Sanborn watering-place aforesaid. During these weeks Giles Winterborne was nowhere to be seen or heard of. At the close of his tenure in Hintock he had sold some of his furniture, packed up the rest a few pieces endeared by associations, or necessary to his occupation, in the house of a friendly neighbour, and gone away. People said that a certain laxity had crept into his life, that he had never gone near a church laterally, and had been sometimes seen on Sundays with unblacked boots, lying on his elbow under a tree with a cynical gaze at surrounding objects. He was likely to return to Hintock when the cider-making season came round, his apparatus being stored there, and travelled with his mill and press from village to village. The narrow interval that stood before the day diminished yet. There was in Grace's mind sometimes a certain anticipate of affection, the satisfaction of feeling that she would be the heroine of an hour. Moreover, she was proud, as a cultivated woman, to be the wife of a cultivated man. It was an opportunity denied very frequently to young women in her position, nowadays not a few, those in whom parental discovery of the value of education has implanted tastes which parental circles failed to gratify. But what an attenuation was this cold pride of the dream of her life, in which she had pictured herself walking in state towards the altar, flushed by the purple light and bloom of her own passion, without a single misgiving as to the sealing of the bond, and fervently receiving as her Jew, the homage of a thousand hearts the fond deep love of one. Everything had been clear then in imagination. Now something was undefined. She had little carking anxieties, a curious faithfulness seemed to rule her, and she experienced a mournful want of someone to confide in. The day loomed so big and nigh that her prophetic ear could in fancy catch the noise of it. Hear the murmur of the villagers as they came out of church. Imagine the jangle of the three thin-toned Hintock bells. The dialogues seemed to grow louder, and the ding-ding dong of those three crazed bells more persistent. She awoke. The morning had come. Five hours later she was the wife of Fitzpiers. The chief hotel at Sherton Abbas was an old stone fronted in with a yawning arch, under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to back-premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the opposite houses. Hence perhaps it arose that the best and most luxurious private sitting-room that the inn could afford overlooked the nether-parts of the establishment, where beyond the yard were to be seen gardens and orchards, now bust, nay encrusted with scarlet and gold fruit, stretching to infinite distance under a luminous lavender mist. The time was early autumn, when the fair apples red as evening sky to bend the tree unto the fruitful ground, when juicy pears and berries of black dye do dance in air and call the eyes around. The landscape confronting the window might indeed have been part of the identical stretch of country which the youthful Chatterton had in his mind. In this room sat she who had been the maiden Grace Melbury till the finger of fate touched her and turned her into a wife. It was two months after the wedding, and she was alone. Fitzpiers had walked out to see the abbey by the light of sunset, but she had been too fatigued to accompany him. They had reached the last stage of a long eight-weeks tour, and were going on to Hintock that night. In the yard between Grace and the orchards there progressed a scene natural to the locality at this time of year. An apple-mill and press had been erected on the spot to which some men were bringing fruit from diverse points in morn baskets, while others were grinding them, and others ringing down the pommice whose sweet juice gushed forth into tubs and pales. The superintendent of these proceedings, to whom the other spoke as master, was a young yeoman of pre-possessing manner and aspect whose form she recognized in a moment. He had hung his coat to a nail of the outhouse wall, and wore his short sleeves rolled up beyond his elbows to keep them unstained while he rammed the pommice into the bags of horsehair. Fragments of apple-rind had alighted upon the brim of his hat and probably from the bursting of a bag, while brown pips of the same fruit were sticking among the down upon his fine round arms. She realized in a moment how he had come there. Down in the heart of the apple-country nearly every farmer kept up a cider-making apparatus and ring-house for his own use, building up the pommice in great straw cheeses, as they were called. But here, on the margin of Pomona's plain, was a debatable land neither orchard nor silvin exclusively, where the apple-produce was hardly sufficient to warrant each proprietor in keeping a mill of his own. This was the field of the travelling cider-maker. His press and mill were fixed to wheels instead of being set up in a cider-house, and with a couple of horses, buckets, tubs, drainers, and an assistant or two, he wandered from place to place, deriving very satisfactory returns for his trouble in such a prolific season as the present. The back-parts of the town were just now abounding with apple-gatherings. They stood in the yards in carts, baskets, and loose heaps, and the blue stagnant air of autumn, which hung over everything, was heavy with a sweet cidery smell. Cakes of pommice lay against the walls in the yellow sun, where they were drying to be used as fuel. Yet it is not the great make of the year as yet. Before the standard crop came in, there accumulated in abundant times like this a large superfluity of early apples, and windfalls from the trees of later harvests which would not keep long. Thus, in the baskets and quivering in the hopper of the mill, she saw specimens of mixed dates, including the mellow countenances of street-jacks, codlands, costards, stubbered, rather-ripes, and other well-known friends of a ravenous youth. Grace watched the headman with interest. The slightest sigh escaped her. Perhaps she thought of the day not so far distant, when that friend of her childhood had met her by her father's arrangement in this same town, warm with hope, though diffident, and trusting in a promise rather implied and given. Or she might have thought of days earlier yet, days of childhood when her mouth was somewhat more ready to receive a kiss from his than was his to bestow one. However, all that was over. She had felt superior to him then, and she felt superior to him now. She wondered why he never looked towards her open window. She did not know that in the slight commotion caused by their arrival at the inn that afternoon, Winterborne had caught sight of her through the archway, had turned red, and was continuing his work with more concentrated attention on the very account of his discovery. Robert Creadle, too, who travelled with Giles, had been incidentally informed by the hostler that Dr. Fitzpiers and his young wife were in the hotel, after which news Creadle kept shaking his head and saying to himself, ah, very audibly, between his thrusts at the screw of the cider-press, why did you use to use that, Robert, asked Winterborne at last, ah, master, it is my thoughts, it is my thoughts. Yes, you've lost a hundred loaded timber, well seasoned, you've lost five hundred pound in good money, you've lost a stone-winded house that's big enough to hold a dozen families, you've lost your share of half a dozen good wagons and their horses, all lost, through your letting-slip shade that was once your own. Good God, Creadle, you drive me mad, said Giles sternly. Don't speak of that any more. Thus the subject had ended in the yard. Meanwhile the passive cause of all this loss still regarded the scene. She was beautifully dressed. She was seated in the most comfortable room that the inn afforded. Her long journey had been full of variety and almost luxuriously performed, for Fitzpiers did not study economy where pleasure was in question. Hence it perhaps arose that Giles and all his belongings seemed sorry and common to her for the moment, moving in a plane so far removed from her own of late that she could scarcely believe she had ever found congruity therein. No, I could never have married him, she said, gently shaking her head. Dear father was right, it would have been too course of life for me. And she looked at the rings of sapphire and opal upon her white and slender fingers that had been gifts from Fitzpiers. Given that Giles still kept his back turned, and with a little of the above-described pride of life, easily to be understood and possibly excused in a young inexperienced woman who thought she had married well, she said at last with a smile on her lips, Mr. Winterborne. He appeared to take no heed, and she said a second time, Mr. Winterborne. Even now he seemed not to hear, though a person close enough to him, to see the expression of his face might have doubted it, and she said a third time with a timid loudness, Mr. Winterborne, what have you forgotten my voice? She remained with her lips parted and a welcoming smile. He turned without surprise and came deliberately towards the window. Why do you call me? He said with a sternness that took her completely unawares, his face being now pale. Is it not enough that you see me here moiling and muddling for my daily bread, while you are sitting there in your success, that you can't refrain from opening old wounds by calling out my name? She flushed and was struck dumb for some moments, but she forgave his unreasoning anger, knowing so well in what had had its root. I am sorry I offended you by speaking, she replied meekly. Believe me, I did not intend to do that. I could hardly sit here so near you without a word of recognition. Winterborne's heart had swollen big, and his eyes grown moist by this time. So much had the gentle answer of that familiar voice moved him. He assured her hurriedly and without looking at her that he was not angry. He then managed to ask her in a clumsy constrained way, if she had had a pleasant journey and seen many interesting sights. She spoke of a few places that she had visited, and so the time passed till he withdrew to take his place at one of the levers which pulled round the screw. Forgotten her voice. He had not forgotten her voice, as his bitterness showed. But though in the heat of the moment he had reproached her keenly, his second mood was a far more tender one, that which could regard her renunciation of such as he as her glory and her privilege, his own fidelity notwithstanding. He could have declared with a contemporary poet. If I forget, the salt creek may forget the ocean. If I forget, the heart whence flows my heart's bright motion. May I sink meaner than the worst, abandoned, outcast, crushed, accursed, if I forget. Though you forget, no word of mine shall marry your pleasure. Though you forget, you filled my barren life with treasure. You may withdraw the gift you gave. You still are queen. I still am slave. Though you forget. She had tears in her eyes at the thought that she could not remind him of what he ought to have remembered, that not herself but the pressure of events had dissipated the dreams of the rarely youth. Grace was thus unexpectedly worsted in her encounter with her old friend. She had opened the window with a faint sense of triumph, but he had turned it into sadness. She did not quite comprehend the reason why. In truth it was because she was not cruel enough in her cruelty. If you have to use a knife, use it, say the great surgeons. And for her own peace, Grace should have condemned Winterborne thoroughly, or not at all. As it was, unclosing the window and indescribable, some might have said, dangerous, pity, quivered in her bosom farum. Presently her husband entered the room and told her what a wonderful sunset there was to be seen. I have not noticed it, but I have seen somebody out there we know, she replied looking into the court. Fitzpiers followed the direction of her eyes and said he did not recognize anybody. Why, Mr. Winterborne, there he is, cider-making. He combines that with his other business, you know. Oh, that fellow, said Fitzpiers, his curiosity becoming extinct. She reproachfully, what, called Mr. Winterborne a fellow-edgar? It is true that I was just saying to myself that I never could have married him, but I have much regard for him and always shall. Well, do by all means, my dear one, I dare say I am inhuman and supercilious and contemptibly proud of my poor old ramshackle family, but I do honestly confess to you that I feel as if I belong to a different species from the people who are working in that yard. And for me too, then, for my blood is no better than theirs. He looked at her with a droll sort of awakening. It was indeed a startling anomaly that this woman of the tribe without shall be standing there beside him as his wife, if his sentiments were as he had said. In their travels together she had ranged so unerringly at his level in ideas, tastes, and habits that he had almost forgotten how his heart had played havoc with his principles in taking her to him. Ah, you! You were refined and educated into something quite different, he said self-assuringly. I don't quite think like that, she murmured with soft regret. And I think you underestimate Giles Winterborne. Remember I was brought up with him till I was sent away to school, so I cannot be radically different. At any rate, I don't feel so. It is no doubt my fault and a great blemish in me, but I hope you will put up with it, Edgar. Fitzpiers said he would endeavour to do so, and as it was now getting on for dusk they prepared to perform the last stage of their journey. So as to arrive at Hintock before it grew very late. In less than half an hour they started, the cider-makers in the yard having ceased their labours and gone away, so that the only sounds audible there now were the trickling of the juice from the tightly-screwed press, and the buzz of a single wasp which had drunk itself so tipsy that it was unconscious of nightfall. Grace was very cheerful at the thought of being soon in her Sylvan home, but Fitzpiers sat beside her almost silent. An indescribable oppressiveness had overtaken him with the near approach of the journey's end, and the realities of life that lay there. "'You don't say a word, Edgar,' she observed, "'aren't you glad to get back? I am.' "'You have friends here, I have none. But my friends are yours.' "'Oh, yes, in that sense.' The conversation languished, and they drew near the end of Hintock Lane. It had been decided that they should at least for a time take up their abode in her father's roomy house, one ring of which was quite at a service being almost disused by the Melbury's. Workmen had been painting, papering, and whitewashing this set of rooms in the wedded pair's absence, and so scrupulous had been the timber-dealer that there should occur no hitch or disappointment on their arrival, that not the smallest detail remained undone. To make it all complete, a ground-flow room had been fitted up as a surgery, with an independent outer door, to which Fitzpiers's brass plate was screwed, for mere ornament, such a sign being quite superfluous where everybody knew the latitude and longitude of his neighbours for miles around. Melbury and his wife welcomed a twain with affection, and all the house with deference. They went up to explore the rooms that opened from a passage on the left hand of the staircase, the entrance to which could be shut off on the landing by a door that Melbury had hung for the purpose. A friendly fire was burning in the grate, although it was not cold. Fitzpiers said that it was too soon for any sort of meal, they only having dined shortly before leaving Sherton Addis. He would walk across to his old lodging, to learn how his locum tenants had got on in his absence. In leaving Melbury's door he looked back at the house. There was economy in living under that roof, and economy was desirable, but in some way he was dissatisfied with the arrangement. It immersed him so deeply in son-in-lawship to Melbury. He went on to his former residence. His deputy was out, and Fitzpiers fell into conversation with his former landlady. Well, Mrs. Cox, what's the best news? He asked of her with cheery weariness. She was a little sour at losing by his marriage so profitable a tenant as the surgeon had proved to be during his residence under her roof, and the more so in their being hardly the remotest chance of her getting such another settler in the Hintock solitudes. "'Tis what I don't wish to repeat, sir, least of all to you,' she mumbled. "'Never mind me, Mrs. Cox, go ahead.' "'It is what people say about your hasty marrying,' Dr. Fitzpiers, whereas they won't believe you know such clever doctrines and physics as once they supposed to be, seeing as you could marry into Mr. Melbury's family, which is only Hintock-born, such as me.' "'They are kindly welcome to their opinion,' said Fitzpiers, not allowing himself to recognize that he winced. "'Anything else?' "'Yes. She's come home at last.' "'Who's she?' "'Mrs. Charmond.' "'No, indeed,' said Fitzpiers, but with slight interest. "'I've never seen her.' "'She has seen you, sir, whether or no?' "'Never.' "'Yes. She saw you in some hotel or street for a minute or two while you were away travelling, and accidentally heard your name, and when she made some remark about you, Miss Ellis, that's her maid, told her you was on your wedding tour with Mr. Melbury's daughter, and she said, he ought to have done better than that, or he fear he has spoiled his chances,' she says. Fitzpiers did not talk much longer to this cheering housewife, and walked home with no very brisk step. He entered the door quietly, and went straight upstairs to the drawing-room, extemporized for their use by Melbury in his and his bride's absence, expecting to find her there as he had left her. The fire was burning still, but there were no lights. He looked into the next apartment, fitted up as a little dining-room, but no supper was laid. He went to the top of the stairs, and heard a chorus of voices in the timber-merchants' parlor below, graces being occasionally intermingled. Descending and looking into the room from the doorway, he found quite a large gathering of neighbours and other acquaintances, praising and congratulating Mrs. Fitzpiers on her return, among them being the dairyman, farmer-bow-tree, and the master-blacksmith from great Hintock, so the cooper, the hollow-turner, the ex-ice-man, and some others with their wives who lived hard by. Grace, girl that she was, had quite forgotten her new dignity and her husbands. She was in the midst of them, blushing and receiving their compliments with all the pleasure of old comradeship. Fitzpiers experienced a profound distaste for the situation. Melbury was nowhere in the room, but Melbury's wife, perceiving the doctor, came to him. She thought, Grace and I, she said, that as they have called, hearing you are calm, we could do no less than ask them to supper, and then Grace proposed that we should all sup together, as it is the first night of your return. By this time Grace had come round to him. Is it not good of them to welcome me so warmly? She exclaimed with tears of friendship in her eyes. After so much good feeling I could not think of our shutting ourselves up away from them in our own dining-room. Certainly not, certainly not, said Fitzpiers, and they entered the room with the heroic smile of a martyr. As soon as they sat down to table, Melbury came in and seemed to see at once that Fitzpiers would much rather have received no such demonstrative reception. He thereupon privately chid his wife for a forwardness in the matter. Mrs. Melbury declared that it was as much Grace's doing as hers, after which there was no more to be said by that young woman's tender father. By this time Fitzpiers was making the best of his position among the wide-elbowed and genial company who sat eating and drinking and laughing and joking around him, and getting warm himself by the good cheer was obliged to admit, after all, the supper was not the least enjoyable he had ever known. At times, however, the words about his having spoiled his opportunities, repeated to him as those of Mrs. Charmond haunted him like a handwriting on the wall. Then his manner would become suddenly abstracted. At one moment he would mentally put an indignant query why Mrs. Charmond or any other woman should make it our business to have opinions about his opportunities. At another he thought that he could hardly be angry with her for taking an interest in the doctor of her own parish. Then he would drink a glass of grog, and so get rid of the misgiving. The hitches and quaffings were soon perceived by Grace as well as by her father, and hence both of them were much relieved when the first of the guests to discover that the hour was growing late rose and declared that they must think of moving homeward. At the words Melbury rose as alertly as if lifted by a spring, and in ten minutes they were gone. Now Grace said her husband as soon as he found himself alone with her in their private apartments. We have had a very pleasant evening, and everybody has been very kind. But we must come to an understanding about our way of living here. If we continue in these rooms there must be no mixing in with your people below. I can't stand it, and that's the truth. She had been sadly surprised at the suddenness of his distaste for those old-fashioned woodland forms of life which in his courtship he had professed to regard with so much interest. But she assented in a moment. We must be simply our father's tenants, he continued, and our goings and comings must be as independent as if we lived elsewhere. Certainly, Edgar, I quite see that it must be so. But you joined in with all those people in my absence without knowing whether I should approve or disapprove. When I came I couldn't help myself at all. She sighing, yes, I say I ought to have waited, though they came unexpectedly, and I thought I had acted for the best. Thus the discussion ended, and the next day Fitzpiers went on his old rounds as usual. But it was easy for so super-subtle an eye as his to discern, or to think he discerned, that he was no longer regarded as an extrinsic, unfathomed gentleman of limitless potentiality, scientific and social, but as Mr. Melbury's compare, and therefore in a degree only one of themselves. The Hintock woodlanders held with all the strength of inherited conviction to the aristocratic principal, and as soon as they had discovered that Fitzpiers was one of the old book-brief Fitzpiers's, they had accorded to him for nothing a touching of hat-brims, promptness of service, and deference of approach which Melbury had to do without, though he paid for it over and over. But now, having proved a traitor to his own cause by his marriage, Fitzpiers was believed in no more as a superior hedged by his own divinity, while as a doctor he began to be rated no higher than old Jones, whom they had so long despised. His few patients seemed in his two-month absence to have dwindled considerably in number, and no sooner had he returned than there came to him from the Board of Gargents a complaint that a pauper had been neglected by his substitute. In a fit of pride Fitzpiers resigned his appointment as one of the surgeons to the Union which had been the nucleus of his practice here. At the end of a fortnight he came indoors one evening to grace more briskly than usual. They have written to me again about that practice in Budmouth that I once negotiated for, he said to her. The premium-asked is eight hundred pounds, and I think that between your father and myself it ought to be raised. Then we can get away from this place for ever. The question had been mooted between them before, and she was not unprepared to consider it. They had not proceeded far with the discussion when a knock came to the door, and in a minute Grammar ran up to say that a message had arrived from Hintock House, requesting Dr. Fitzpiers to attend there at once. Mrs. Charmond had met with a slight accident through the overturning of her carriage. This is something, anyhow, said Fitzpiers, rising with an interest which he could not have defined. I have had a presentiment that this mysterious woman and I were to be better acquainted. The latter words were murmured to himself alone. Good night, said Grace, as soon as he was ready, I shall be asleep, probably, when you return. Good night! He replied inattentively, and went downstairs. It was the first time, since their marriage, that he had left her without a kiss. CHAPTER 26 Winterborne's house had been pulled down. On this account his face had been seen but fitfully in Hintock, and he would probably have disappeared from the place altogether, but for a slight business connection with Melbury, on whose premises Giles kept his cider-making apparatus, now that he had no place of his own to stow it in. Coming here one evening on his way to a hut beyond the wood where he now slept, he noticed that the familiar brown-tatched pinion of his paternal roof had vanished from its sight, and that the walls were levelled. In present circumstances he had a feeling for the spot that might have been called Morbid, and when he had supped in the hut of four said, he made use of the spare hour before bedtime to return to Little Hintock in the twilight, and ramble over the patch of ground on which he had first seen the day. He repeated this evening visit on several like occasions, even in the gloom he could trace where the different rooms had stood, could mark the shape of the kitchen chimney corner in which he had roasted apples and potatoes in his boyhood, cast his bullets, and burned his initials and articles that did and did not belong to him. The apple-trees still remained to show where the garden had been, the oldest of them even now retaining the crippled slant to north-east, given them by the great November Gale of 1824, which carried a brig bodily over the Cheswell Bank. They were at present bent to a still greater obliquity by the heaviness of their produce. Apples bobbed against his head, and in the grass beneath he crunched scores of them as he walked. There was nobody to gather them now. It was on the evening under notice that, half sitting, half leaning against one of these inclined trunks, Winterborne had become lost in his thoughts as usual, till one little star after another had taken up a position in the piece of sky which now confronted him, where his walls and chimney had formally raised their outlines. The house had jutted awkwardly into the road, and the opening caused by its absence was very distinct. In the silence the trot of horses and the spin of carriage-wheels became audible, and the vehicle soon shaped itself against the blank sky, bearing down upon him with the bend and the lane which he recurred, and of which the house had been the cause. He could discern the figure of a woman high up on the driving-seat of a faton, a groom being just visible behind. Presently there was a slight scrape, then a scream. Winterborne went across to the spot and found that the faton had half overturned, its driver sitting on the heap of rubbish which had once been his dwelling, and the man seizing the horse's heads. The equipage was Mrs. Sharman's, and the unseated charioteer was that lady herself. To his inquiry, if she were hurt, she made some incoherent reply to the effect that she did not know. The damage in other respects was little or none. The faton was righted, and Mrs. Sharman placed in it, and the reins given to the servant. It appeared that she had been deceived by the removal of the house, imagining that the gap caused by the demolition to be the opening of the road, so that she turned in upon the ruins instead of at the bend a few yards further on. Drive home! Drive home! cried the lady impatiently, and they started on their way. They had not, however, gone many paces, when the air being still, Winterborne heard her say, Stop! Tell that man to call the doctor, Mr. Fitzpiers, and send him on to the house. I find I am hurt more seriously than I thought. Winterborne took the message from the groom and proceeded to the doctors at once. Having delivered it, he stepped back into the darkness, and waited till he had seen Fitzpiers leave the door. He stood for a few minutes, looking at the window which, by its light, revealed the room where Grace was sitting, and went away under the gloomy trees. Fitzpiers duly arrived at Hintock House, whose doors he now saw open for the first time. Contrary to his expectation there was no visible sign of that confusion or alarm which a serious accident to the mistress of the abode would have occasioned. He was shown into a room at the top of the staircase, cosily and femininely draped, where, by the light of the shaded lamp, he saw a woman of full round figure, reclining upon a couch in such a position as not to disturb a pile of magnificent hair on the crown of her head. A deep purple dressing gown formed an admirable foil to the peculiarly rich brown of her hair-plats. Her left arm, which was naked nearly up to the shoulder, was thrown upward, and between the fingers of her right hand she held a cigarette, while she idly breathed from her plump lips a thin stream of smoke towards the ceiling. The doctor's first feeling was the sense of his exaggerated provision in having brought appliances for a serious case. The next, something more curious. While the scene and the moment were new to him and unanticipated, the sentiment and essence of the moment were indescribably familiar. What could be the cause of it? Probably a dream. Mrs. Charmond did not move more than to raise her eyes to him, and he came and stood by her. She glanced up at his face across her brows of forehead, and then he observed a blush creep slowly over her decidedly handsome cheeks. Her eyes, which had lingered upon him with an inquiring, conscious expression, were hastily withdrawn, and she mechanically applied the cigarette again to her lips. For a moment he forgot his errand, till suddenly arousing himself he addressed her, or formally condoled with her, and made the usual professional inquiries about what had happened to her and where she was hurt. That's what I want you to tell me, she murmured, in tones of indefinable reserve. I quite believe in you, for I know you are very accomplished, because you study so hard. I'll do my best to justify your good opinion," said the young man, bowing, and none the less that I am happy to find the accident has not been serious. I am very much shaken, she said. Oh yes, he replied, and completed his examination, which convinced him that there was really nothing the matter with her, and more than ever puzzled him as to why he had been fetched since she did not appear to be a timid woman. You must rest awhile, and I'll send something. He said, Oh, I forgot, she returned. Look here. And she showed him a little scrape on her arm, the full round arm that was exposed. Put some court plaster on that, please. He obeyed. And now, she said, Before you go I want to put a question to you. Sit round there in front of me on that load-chair, and bring the candles, or one, to the little table. Do you smoke? Yes. That's right. Good evening. Take one of these, and here's a light. She threw him a box of matches. Fitzpiers caught it, and having lit up, regarded her from his new position, which, with the shifting of the candles, for the first time afforded him a full view of her face. How many years have passed since we first met? She resumed in a voice which she mainly endeavored to maintain at its former pitch of composure, and eyeing him with daring bashfulness. We met, do you say? She nodded. I saw you recently at a hotel in London when you were passing through, I suppose with your bride, and I recognized you as one I had met in my girlhood. Do you remember, when you were studying at Heidelberg, an English family that was staying there, who used to walk, and the young lady who wore a long tail of rare-coloured hair? Ah! I see it before my eyes, who lost her gloves on the great terrace, who was going back in the dusk to find them. To whom I said, I'll go for them, and you said, Oh! they are not worth coming all that way up again for. I do remember, and how very long we stayed talking there. I went next morning, while the Jew was on the grass, and there they lay, the little fingers sticking out damp and thin. I see them now. I pick them up, and then— Well! I kissed them. He rejoined rather shame-facedly. But you had hardly ever seen me, except in the dusk. Never mind. I was young then, and I kissed them. I wondered how I could make the most of my travail, and decided that I would call at your hotel with them that afternoon. It rained, and I waited till the next day. I called, and you were gone. Yes, answered she, with dry melancholy. My mother, knowing my disposition, said she had no wish for such a chit as me to go falling in love with an impecunious student, and spirited me away to Baden. As it is all over and past, I'll tell you one thing. I should have sent you a line, passing warm, had I known your name. That name I never knew till my maid said, as you passed up the hotel stairs a month ago, there's Dr. Fitzpiers. Good heavens, said Fitzpiers musingly, how the time comes back to me. The evening, the morning, the Jew, the spot. When I found that you were really gone, it was as if a cold iron had been passed down my back. I went up to where you had stood when I last saw you. I flung myself on the grass, and being not much more than a boy, my eyes were literally blinded with tears. Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I could not forget your voice. For how long? Oh, ever so long, days and days. Days and days? Only days and days? Oh, the heart of a man, days and days. But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not full blown love. It was the nearest bud, red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion and posse, a giant and embryo, it never matured. So much the better, perhaps. Perhaps, but see how powerless is the human will against predestination. We were prevented meeting. We have met. One feature of the case remains the same, amid many changes. You are still rich, and I am still poor, and better than that. You have, judging by your last remark, outgrown the foolish and pulse of passions of your early girlhood. I have not outgrown mine. I beg your pardon, she said, with vibrations of strong feeling in her words. I have been placed in a position which hinders such outgrowings. Besides, I don't believe that the genuine subjects of emotions do outgrow them. I believe that the older such people get, the worse they are. Possibly at ninety or a hundred they may feel they are cured, but a mere three-score and ten won't do it, at least for me. He gave it her, in an undisguised admiration. There was a soul of souls. Mrs. Charmond, you speak truly, he exclaimed, but you speak sadly as well. Why is that? I always am sad when I come here, she said, dropping to a low tone, with a sense of having been too demonstrative. Then may I inquire why you came? A man brought me. Women are always carried about like corks upon the waves of masculine desires. I hope I have not alarmed you, but Hintock has a curious effect of bottling up the emotions till one can no longer hold them. I am often obliged to fly away and discharge my sentiments somewhere, or I should die outright. There is very good society in the county for those who have the privilege of entering it. Perhaps so, but the misery of remote country life is that your neighbours have no toleration for difference of opinion and habit. My neighbours think I am an atheist, except those who think I am a Roman Catholic, and when I speak disrespectfully of the weather or crops, they think I am a blasphemer. She broke into a low musical laugh at the idea. You don't wish me to stay any longer, he inquired, when he found that she remained musing. No, I think not. Then tell me that I ought to be gone. Why, can't you go without? I may consult my own feelings only, if left to myself. Well, if you do, what then? Do you suppose you'll be in my way? I feared it might be so. Then fear no more, but good night. Come to-morrow, and see if I am going on right. This renewal of acquaintance touches me. I have already a friendship for you. If it depends upon myself, it shall last forever. My best hopes that it may. Goodbye. Fitzpiers went down the stairs absolutely unable to decide whether she had sent for him in the natural alarm which might have followed her mishap, or with a single view of making herself known to him as she had done, for which the capsize had afforded excellent opportunity. Outside the house he mused over the spot under the light of the stars. It seemed very strange that he should have come there more than once, when its inhabitant was absent, and observed the house with a nameless interest, that he should have assumed offhand before he knew grace that it was where she lived, that, in short, at sundry times and seasons the individuality of Hintock House should have forced itself upon him as appertaining to some existence with which he was concerned. The intersection of his temporal orbit with Mrs. Charmond for a day or two in the past had created a sentimental interest in her at the time, but it had been so evanescent that in the ordinary onward role of affairs he would scarce ever have recalled it again. To find her here, however, in these somewhat romantic circumstances, magnify that bygone and transitory tenderness to indescribable proportions. On entering little Hintock he found himself regarding it in a new way, from the Hintock House point of view, rather than from his own and the Melbury's. The household had all gone to bed, and as he went upstairs he heard the snore of the timber merchant from his quarter of the building, and turned into the passage communicating with his own rooms in a strange access of sadness. A light was burning for him in the chamber, but grace, though in bed, was not asleep. In a moment her sympathetic voice came from behind the curtains. Edgar, is she very seriously hurt? Fitzpiers had so entirely lost sight of Mrs. Charmond as a patient, that he was not on the instant ready with a reply. Oh, no, he said. There are no bones broken, but she had shaken. I am going again to moral. Another inquiry or two, and Grace said, did she ask for me? Well, I think she did, I don't quite remember, but I am under the impression that she spoke of you. Can't you recollect at all what she said? I cannot, just this minute. At any rate, she did not talk much about me, said Grace, with disappointment. Oh, no! But you did, perhaps, she added, innocently fishing for a compliment. Oh, yes, you may depend upon that, he replied warmly, though scarcely thinking of what he was saying, so vividly was there present to his mind the personality of Mrs. Charmond. CHAPTER 27 The Doctor's professional visit to Hintalk House was promptly repeated the next day and the next. He always found Mrs. Charmond reclining on a sofa, and behaving generally as became a patient who was in no great hurry to lose that title. On each occasion he looked gravely at the little scratch on her arm, as if it had been a serious wound. He had also, to his further satisfaction, found a slight scar on her temple, and it was very convenient to put a piece of black plaster on this conspicuous part of her person in preference to gold-beater's skin, so that it might catch the eyes of the servants and make his presence appear decidedly necessary in case there should be any doubt of the fact. Oh, you hurt me! she exclaimed one day. He was peeling off a bit of plaster on her arm, under which this grape had turned the colour of an unripe blackberry, previous to vanishing altogether. Wait a moment, then. I'll damp it, said Fitzpiers. He put his lips to the place and kept them there till the plaster came off easily. It was at your request that I put it on, said he. I know it, she replied. Is that blue vein still in my temple that used to show there? The scar must be just upon it. If the cut had been a little deeper it would have spilt my hot blood, indeed. Fitzpiers examined so closely that his breath touched her tenderly, at which their eyes rose to an encounter, hers showing themselves as deep and mysterious as interstellar space. She turned her face away suddenly. Ah! none of that! none of that! I cannot coquette with you, she cried. Don't suppose a consent for one moment. Our poor, brief youthful hour of love-making was too long ago to bear continuing now. It is as well that we should understand each other on that point before we go further. Coquette! nor I, with you! As it was when I found the historic love, so it is now. I might have been, and may be foolish, but I have no trifler. I naturally cannot forget the little space in which I flitted across the field of your vision in those days of the past, and the recollection opens up all sorts of imaginings. Suppose my mother had not taken me away. She murmured, her dreamy eyes resting on the swaying tip of a distant tree. I should have seen you again. And then? Then the fire would have burned higher and higher. What would have immediately followed a no-not, but sorrow and sickness of heart at last? Why? Well, that's the end of all love, according to Nature's law, but I can give no other reason. Oh! don't speak like that! she exclaimed. Since we are only picturing the possibilities of that time, don't, for pity's sake, spoil the picture. Her voice sang almost to a whisper, as she added, with an incipient pout upon her full lips. Let me think, at least, that if you had really loved me at all seriously, you would have loved me for ever and ever. You are right. Think it with all your heart, said he. It is a pleasant thought and costs nothing. She weighed that remark in silence a while. Did you ever hear anything of me from then till now? She inquired. Not a word. So much the better. I had to fight the battle of life as well as you. I may tell you about it some day, but don't ever ask me to do it, and particularly do not press me to tell you now. Thus the two or three days that they had spent in tender acquaintance, on the romantic slopes above the Neckar, were stretched out in retrospect to the length and importance of years, made to form a canvas of infinite fancies, idle dreams, luxurious melancholys and sweet alluring assertions, which could neither be proved nor disproved. Grace was never mentioned between them, but a rumour of his proposed domestic changes somehow reached her ears. "'Doctor, you are going away,' she exclaimed, confronting him with accusatory reproach in her large dark eyes, no less than in her rich, cooing voice. "'Oh, yes you are,' she went on, springing to her feet, with an air which might almost have been called passionate. "'It is no use denying it. You have bought a practice at Budmouth. I don't blame you. Nobody can live at Hintock, least of all a professional man, who wants to keep a breast of recent discovery. And there is nobody here to induce such a one to stay for other reasons. That's right. That's right. Go away.' "'But no, I have not actually bought the practice as yet, and though I am indeed in treaty for it. And, my dear friend, if I continue to feel about the business as I feel at this moment, perhaps I may conclude never to go at all. But you hate Hintock, and everybody, and everything in it, that you don't mean to take away with you?' Fitzpair's contradicted this idea in his most vibratory tones, and she lapsed into the frivolous artness under which she hid passions of no mean strength, strange, smouldering erratic passions, kept down like a stifled conflagration, but bursting out now here, now there, the only certain element in their direction being its unexpectedness. If one word could have expressed her, it would have been in consequence. She was a woman of perversities, delighting in frequent contrasts. She liked mystery, in her life, in her love, in her history. To be fair to her, there was nothing in the latter which she had any great reason to be ashamed of, and many things of which she might have been proud. But it had never been fathomed by the honest minds of Hintock, and she rarely volunteered her experiences. As for her capricious nature, the people on her estates grew accustomed to it, and with that marvellous subtlety of contrivance in steering round odd tempers, that is found in sons of the soil and dependents generally, they managed to get along under her government rather better than they would have done beneath a more equitable rule. Now, with regard to the doctor's notion of leaving Hintock, he had advanced further towards completing the purchase of the Budmouth Surgeon's goodwill, than he had admitted to Mrs. Sharman's. The whole matter hung upon what he might do in the ensuing twenty-four hours. The evening after leaving her, he went out into the lane, and walked and pondered between the high hedges, now greenish-white with wild clematis, here called old man's beard from its aspect later in the year. The letter of acceptance was to be written that night, after which his departure from Hintock would be irrevocable. But could he go away, remembering what had just passed? The trees, the hills, the leaves, the grass, each had been endowed and quickened with a subtle charm, since he had discovered the person at history, and, above all, mood of their owner. There was every temperate reason for leaving. It would be entering again into a world which he had only quitted in a passion for isolation, induced by a fit of achillian moodiness after an imagined slight. His wife herself saw the awkwardness of their position here, and cheerfully welcomed a proposed change, towards which every step had been taken but the last. But could he find it in his heart, as he found it clearly enough in his conscience, to go away? He drew a troubled breath, and went indoors. Here he rapidly penned the letter, wherein he withdrew once for all from the treaty for the Budmouth practice. As the postman had already left Little Hintock for that night, he sent one of Melbury's men to intercept a mail-card on another turnpike road, and so got the letter off. The man returned, met Fitzpiers in the lane, and told him the thing was done. Fitzpiers went back to his house, musing. Why had he carried out this impulse, taken such wild trouble to effect a probable injury to his own and his young wife's prospects? His motive was fantastic, glowing, shapeless as the fiery scenery about the western sky. Mrs. Charmond could overtly be nothing more to him than a patient now, and to his wife, at the outside, a patron. Indy on attached bachelor-days of his first soldiering here, how highly proper and emotional reason for lingering on would have appeared to troublesome dubiousness. Matrimonial ambition is such an honourable thing. My father has told me that you have sent off one of the men with the letter to Budmouth, quite grace, coming out vivaciously to meet him under the reclining light of the sky, wherein hung solitary the folding star. I said at once that you had finally agreed to pay the premium they ask, and that the tedious question had been settled. When do we go, Edgar? I have altered my mind. Said he. They want too much—750 is too large a sum—and in short I have declined to go further. We must wait for another opportunity. I fear I am not a good businessman. He spoke the last words at the moment of refaltering at the great foolishness of his act, for as he looked, in her fair and honourable face, his heart reproached him for what he had done. Her manner that evening showed her disappointment. Personally she liked the home of her childhood much, and she was not ambitious, but her husband had seemed so dissatisfied with the circumstances hereabouts since their marriage, that she had sincerely hoped to go for his sake. It were two or three days before he visited Mrs. Charmond again. The morning had been windy, and little showers had sewed themselves like grain against the walls and window-pains of the Hintock cottages. He went on foot across the wilder recesses of the park, where slimy streams of green moisture, exuding from decayed holes caused by old amputations, ran down the bark of the oaks and elms, the rind below being coated with a lighteness wash as green as emerald. There were stout trunked trees that never rocked their stems in the fiercest gale, responding to it entirely by crooked their limbs. Wrinkled, like an old crone's face, and antlered with dead branches that rose above the foliage of their summits, they were nevertheless still green, though yellow had invaded the leaves of other trees. She was in a little boudoir or writing-room on the first floor, and Fitzpiers was most surprised to find that the window-curtains were closed, and a red-shaded lamp and candles burning, though out of doors it was broad daylight. Moreover, a large fire was burning in the grate, though it was not cold. "'What is all this mean?' he asked. She sat in an easy chair, her face being turned away. "'Oh!' she murmured. "'It is because the world is so dreary outside. Sorrow and bitterness in the sky, and floods of agonized tears beating against the panes. I lay awake last night, and I could hear the scrape of snails creeping up the window-glass. It was so sad. My eyes were so heavy this morning that I could have wept my life away. I cannot bear you to see my face. I keep it away from you purposely.' "'Oh, why were we given hungry hearts and wild desires if we have to live in a world like this? Why should death only lend what life is compelled to borrow? Rest!' answered that doctor, Fitzpiers. "'You must eat of a second tree of knowledge before you can do it, Felice Charmond.' "'Then when my emotions have exhausted themselves, I become full of fears, till I think I shall die for very fear. The terrible insistencies of society, how severe they are, and cold and inexorable, ghastly towards those who are made of wax and not of stone. Oh, I am afraid of them! A stab for this error and a stab for that. Correctives and regulations frame that society may tend to perfection. An end, which I don't care for, in the least. Yet for this all I do care for has to be stunted and starved.' Fitzpiers had seated himself near her. "'What sets you in this mournful mood?' he asked gently. In reality he knew that it was a result of a loss of tone from staying indoors too much, but he did not say so. "'My reflections. Doctor, you must not come here any more.' They began to think it a farce already. "'I say you must come no more. There, don't be angry with me.' She jumped up, pressed his hand, and looked anxiously at him. "'It is necessary. It is best for both you and me.' "'But,' said Fitzpiers gloomily, "'what have we done?' "'Done. We have done nothing. Perhaps we have taught no more. However, it is all vexation. I am going away to Middleton Abbey near Shotsford, where a relative of my late husband lives, who is confined to her bed. The engagement was made in London, and I can't get out of it. Perhaps it is for the best that I go there till all this is passed. When are you going to enter on your new practice and leave Hintock behind forever, with your pretty wife and your arm?' "'I have refused the opportunity. I love this place too well to depart.' "'You have,' she said, regarding him with wild uncertainty. "'Why do you ruin yourself in that way? Great Heaven, what have I done?' "'Nothing, besides you are going away.' "'Oh, yes, but only to Middleton Abbey for a month or two. Yet perhaps I shall gain strength there, particularly strength of mine, I require it. And when I come back I shall be a new woman, and you can come and see me safely then, and bring your wife with you, and we'll be friends, she and I. Oh, how this shutting up of oneself does lead to indulgence in idle sentiments! I shall not wish you to give your attendance to me after to-day. But I am glad that you are not going away, if your remaining does not injure your prospect at all.' As soon as he had left the room, the mild friendliness she had preserved in her tone at parting, the playful sadness with which she had conversed with him, equally departed from her. She became as heavy as lead, just as she had been before he arrived. Her whole being seemed to dissolve in a sad powerlessness to do anything, and the sense of it made her lips tremulous, and her closed eyes wet. His footsteps again startled her, and she turned round. "'I return for a moment to tell you that the evening is going to be fine. The sun is shining, so do open your curtains and put out those lights. Shall I do it for you?' "'Please, if you don't mind.' He drew back the window-curtains, whereupon the red glow of the lamp and the two candle-flames became almost invisible with the flood of late autumn sunlight that poured in. "'Shall I come round to you?' He asked, her back being towards him. "'No,' she replied. "'Why not?' "'Because I am crying, and I don't want to see you.' He stood a moment to resolute, and regretted that he had killed the rosy, passionate lamp-light by opening the curtains and letting in garish day. "'Then I am going,' he said. "'Very well,' she answered, stretching one hand round to him, and patting her eyes with a handkerchief held in the other. "'Shall I write a line to you at?' "'No, no.' A gentle, reasonableist came into her tone, and she added. "'It must not be, you know. It won't do.' "'Very well. Good-bye.' The next moment he was gone. In the evening, with listless adroitness, she encouraged the maid who dressed her for dinner to speak of Dr. Fitzpiers's marriage. "'Mrs. Fitzpiers was once opposed to favour Mr. Winterborne,' said the young woman. "'And why didn't she marry him?' said Mrs. Charmond. "'Because, you see, ma'am, he lost his houses.' "'Lost his houses? How came me to do that?' The houses were held on lives, and the lives dropped, and your agent wouldn't renew them, though it is said that Mr. Winterborne had a very good claim. That's as I've heard it, ma'am, and it was true it that the match was broken off.' Being just then distracted by a dozen emotions, Mrs. Charmond sunk into a mood of dismal self-reproach. In refuting that poor man his reasonable request, she said to herself, I fordoomed my rejuvenated girlhood's romance. Who should have thought such a business matter could have nettle'd my own heart like this? Now for a winter of regrets and agonies and useless wishes, till I forget him in the spring. Oh, I am glad I am going away.' She left her chamber and went down to dine with a sigh. On the stairs she stood opposite the large window for a moment and looked out upon the lawn. It was not yet quite dark. Halfway up the steep green slope confronting her stood old timothy Tangs, who were shortening his way homeward by clambering here where there was no road, and in opposition to express orders that no path was to be made there. Tangs had momentarily stopped to take a pinch of snuff, but observing Mrs. Charmond gazing at him, he hastened to get over the top out of hail. His precipitancy made him miss his footing, and he rolled like a barrel to the bottom, his snuff-box rolling in front of him. Her indefinite idle and possible passion for Fitzpiers, her constitutional cloud of misery, the sorrowful drops that still hung upon her eyelashes, all made way for the incursive mood started by the spectacle. She burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, her very gloom of the previous hour, seeming to render it the more uncontrollable. It had not died out of her when she reached the dining-room, and even there before the servants her shoulders suddenly shook as the scene returned upon her, and the tears of her hilarity mingled with the remnants of those engendered by her grief. She resolved to be sad no more. She drank two glasses of champagne, and a little more still after those, and amused herself in the evening with singing little amatory songs. I must do something for that poor man winter-born, however, she said. End of Chapter 27