 CHAPTER 1 The Rambler, who, for old association or other reasons, should trace the forsaken coach-road running almost in a meridional line from Bristol to the south shore of England, would find himself during the latter half of his journey in the vicinity of some extensive woodlands, interspersed with apple orchards. Here the trees, timber or fruit-bearing as the case may be, make the wayside hedges ragged by their drip and shade, stretching over the road with easeful horizontality, as if they found the unsubstantial air an adequate support for their limbs. At one place, where a hill is crossed, the largest of the woods shows itself bisected by a highway, as the head of thick hair is bisected by the white line of its parting. The spot is lonely. The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be probably accounts for this. To step, for instance, at the place under notice, from the hedge of the plantation into the adjoining pale thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride, the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus of the full orn. At this spot, on the lowering evening of a bygone winter's day, there stood a man who had entered upon the scene much in the aforesaid manner, alighting into the road from a style-hard by. He, though by no means a chosen vessel for impressions, was temporarily influenced by some such feeling of being suddenly more alone than before he had emerged upon the highway. It could be seen by a glance at his rather finical style of dress that he did not belong to the country proper, and from his air, after a while, that though there might be a somber beauty in the scenery, music in the breeze, and a wan procession of coaching ghosts in the sentiment of this old turnpike road, he was mainly puzzled about the way. The dead man's work that had been expended in climbing that hill, the blistered souls that had trodden it, and the tears that had wetted it, were not his concern, for fate had given him no time for any but practical things. He looked north and south, and mechanically prodded the ground with his walking stick. A closer glance at his face corroborated the testimony of his clothes. It was self-complacent, yet there was small apparent ground for such complacence. Nothing irradiated it. To the eye of the magician in character, if not to the ordinary observer, the expression enthroned there was absolute submission to, and belief in, a little assortment of forms and habitudes. At first not a soul appeared who could enlighten him as he desired, or seemed likely to appear that night, but presently a slight noise of laboring wheels and the steady dig of a horse's shoe-tips became audible, and loomed in the notch of the hill and the plantation that the road formed here at the summit, a carrier's van drawn by a single horse. When it got nearer, he said, with some relief to himself, "'Tis Mrs. Dolary's. This will help me.' The vehicle was half full of passengers, mostly women. He held up his stick at its approach, and the woman who was driving drew rain. "'I've been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this last half hour, Mrs. Dolary,' he said, but though I've been to Great Hintock, and Hintock House half a dozen times, I must fault about the small village. You can help me, I dare say.' She assured him that she could, that as she went to Great Hintock her van passed near it, that it was only up the lane that branched out of the lane into which she was about to turn just ahead. "'Though,' continued Mrs. Dolary, "'tis such a little small place, that as a town gentleman you'd need to have a candle and lantern to find it if you don't know where it is. Be'dad, I wouldn't live there if they paid me to. Now at Great Hintock you do see the world a bit.' He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where there were ever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail. This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dolary, was rather a movable attachment of the road than an extraneous object, to those who knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and colour of heather, whose leg joints, shoulders, and huffs were distorted by harness and drudgery from coltod, though, if all had their rights, he ought, symmetrically in outline to have been picking the hair-wage of some eastern plain, instead of tugging hair, had trodden this road almost daily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made congruous throughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not drawn through the cupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one side. He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of ground between Hintock and Shirt and Abbas, the market-town to which he journeyed, as accurately as any surveyor could have learnt it, by a dumpy level. The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion of the wheels, and at a point in it over the driver's head was a hook to which the reins were hitched at times, when they formed a catenary curve from the horse's shoulders. Somewhere about the axles was a loose chain, whose only known purpose was to clink as it went. Mrs. Dollery, having to hop up and down many times in the service of her passengers, wore, especially in windy weather, short leggings under a gown for modesty's sake, and instead of a bonnet, a felt hat tied down with a handkerchief to guard against the earache to which she was frequently subject. In the rear of the van was a glass window, which she cleaned with her pocket-handkerchief every market day before starting. Looking at the van from the back, the spectator could thus see, through its interior, a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw without, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who, as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in animated private converse, remained in happy unconsciousness that their mannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the public eye. This hour of coming home from market was the happy one, if not the happiest of the week for them. Snuggly and sconce under the tilt, they could forget the sorrows of the world without, and survey life and recapitulate the incidents of the day with placid smiles. The passengers in the back part formed a group to themselves, and while the newcomer spoke to the proprietress, they indulged in a confidential chat about them as about other people, which the noise of the van rendered inaudible to himself and Mrs. Dollary sitting forward. "'Tis Barbara Percom, he that's got the waxing woman in his window at the top of Abbey Street,' said one, "'what business can bring him from his shop, out here at this time, and not a journeyman hair-cutter, but a master barber, that's left off his pole, because there's not Gentile?' They listened to his conversation, but Mr. Percom, though he had nodded and spoken genially, seemed indisposed to gratify the curiosity which he had aroused, and the unrestrained flow of ideas which had animated the inside of the van before his arrival, was checked dense forth. Thus they rode on till they turned into a half-invisible little lane, whence, as it reached the verge of an eminence, could be discerned in the dusk about half a mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in a concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From this self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke, which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet heart-stones festooned overhead with hands and flitches. It was one of these sequestered spots outside the gates of the world, where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation, where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in inferences wildly imaginative, yet where from time to time, no less than in other places, dramas of grandeur and unity truly suffer clean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of the lives therein. This place was the little hintock of the Master Barber's search. The coming night gradually obscured the smoke of the chimneys, but the position of the sequestered little world could still be distinguished by a few faint lights, winking more or less ineffectually through the leafless boughs, and the underserned stonksters they bore, in the form of balls of feathers at roost among them. Out of the lane followed by the van branched a yet smaller lane, at the corner of which the Barber alighted, Mrs. Dolary's van going on to the larger village, whose superiority to the despised smaller one, as an exemplar of the world's movements, was not particularly apparent in its means of approach. A very clever and learned young doctor, who they say is in league with the devil, lives in the place you would be going to, not because there's anybody found a cure there, but because he's in the middle of his district. This observation was flung at the Barber by one of the women at parting, as a last attempt to get at his errand that way. But he made no reply, and without further pause the pedestrian plunged towards the umbrageous nook, and paced cautiously over the dead leaves which nearly buried the road or street of the Hamlet. As very few people except themselves passed this way after dark, a majority of the Denzians of Little Hintock deemed window-cortons unnecessary, and on this account Mr. Perkham made it his business to stop, opposite the casements of each cottage that he came to, with a demeanor which showed that he was endeavouring to conjecture from the persons and things he observed within, the whereabouts of somebody or other who resided there. Only the smaller dwellings interested him, one or two houses whose size, antiquity, and rambling appurtenances signified that notwithstanding their remoteness they must formally have been, if they were not still, inhabited by people of a certain social standing, being neglected by him entirely. Smells of pommice and the hiss of fermenting cider which reached him from the back-quarters of other tenements, revealed the recent occupation of some of the inhabitants, and joined with the scent of decay from the perishing leaves underfoot. A dozen dwellings were passed without result. The next, which stood opposite a tall tree, was in an exceptional state of radiance, the flickering brightness from the inside shining up the chimney, and making a luminous mist of the emerging smoke. The interior, as seen through the window, caused them to draw up with a terminate of air and watch. The house was rather large for a cottage, and the door which opened immediately into the living-room stood a jar, so that a ribbon of light fell through the opening into the dark atmosphere without. Every now and then a moth decrepit from the late season would flit for a moment across the out-coming rays, and disappear again into the night. From which this cheerful blaze proceeded, he beheld a girl seated on a willow chair, and busily occupied by the light of the fire, which was ample and of wood. With a bill-hook in one hand, and a leathered love much too large for her on the other, she was making spars such as are used by tatchers with great rapidity. She wore a leather apron for this purpose, which was also much too large for her figure. On her left hand lay a bundle of the straight, smooth sticks called spar-gads, the raw material of her manufacture. On her right a heap of chips and ends, the refuse with which the fire was maintained, in front a pile of the finished articles. To produce them she took up each gad, looked critically at it from end to end, cut it to length, split it into four, and sharpened each of the quarters with dexterous blows, which brought it to a triangular point, precisely resembling that of a bayonet. Beside her, in case she might require more light, a brass candlestick stood on a little round table, curiously formed of an old coffin-stool, with a deal-top nailed on, the white surface of the latter contrasting oddly with the black carved oak of the substructure. The social position of the household in the past was almost as definitely known by the presence of this article, as that of an Esquire or nobleman, by his old helmets or shields. It had been customary for every well-to-do villager, whose tenure was by copy of court-roll, or in any way more permanent than that of mere cotter, to keep a pair of these stools for the use of his own dead. But for the last generation or two a feeling of coibono had led to the discontinuance of the custom, and the tools were frequently made use of in the manner described. The young woman laid down the bill-hook for a moment, and examined the palm of her right hand, which, unlike the other, was ungloved, and showed little hardness or roughness about it. The palm was red and blistering, as if the present occupation were not frequent enough with her to subdue it to what it worked in. As with so many right-hands born to manual labour, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to bear out the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth, gentle or mean, show themselves primarily in the form of this member. Nothing but a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl should handle the tool, and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash-halfed might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had they only been set to do it in good time. Her face had the usual fullness of expression which is developed by a life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude beat like waves upon accountants, they seemed to wear away its individuality, but in the still water of privacy every tentacle of feeling and sentiment shoots out invisible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a child's look by an intruder. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality. Thus she had but little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent particular, her hair. Its abundance made it almost unmanageable, its color was, roughly speaking, and as seen here by fire-light, brown, but careful notice, or an observation by day, would have revealed that its true shade was a rare and beautiful approximation to chestnut. On this one bright gift of time to the particular victim of his now before us, the newcomer's eyes were fixed, meanwhile the fingers of his right hand mechanically played over something sticking up from his waistcoat pocket, the bows of a pair of scissors whose polish made them feebly responsive to the light within. In her present beholder's mind the scene formed by the girlish sparmaker composed itself into a post-Raphaelite picture of extremist quality, wherein the girl's hair alone, as the focus of observation, was depicted with intensity and distinctness, with her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general, being a blurred mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity. He hesitated no longer, but tapped at the door and entered. The young woman turned at the crunch of his boots and the sanded floor, and exclaiming, Oh, Mr. Percombe, how you frighten me? Quite lost her color for a moment. He replied, You should such adore, and then you'd hear folk open it. I can't, she said, the chimney smoke so. Mr. Percombe, you look as unnatural out of your shop as a canary in a thorn hedge. It surely you have not come here on my account for it. Yes, to have your answer about this. He touched her head with his cane, and she winced. Do you agree? He continued, It is necessary that I should know at once, as the lady is soon going away, and it takes time to make up. Don't press me, it worries me. I was in hopes you had thought no more of it. I cannot part with it, so there. Now, look here, Marty, said the barber, sitting down on the coffin-stool table. How much do you get for making these spars? Hush, father's upstairs awake, and you don't know that I'm doing his work. Well, now tell me, said the man more softly, how much do you get? Eighty and pence a thousand, she said reluctantly. Who are you making them for? Mr. Melbury, the timber-dealer, just below here. And how many can you make in a day? In a day and a half the night, three bundles, that's a thousand and a half. Two and three pence. The barber paused. Well, look here, he continued, with the remains of a calculation in his tone, which calculation had been the reduction to figures of the probable monetary magnetism necessary to overpower the resistant force of our present purse, and the woman's love of comeliness. Here's a sovereign, a gold-sovereign, almost new. He held it out between his finger and thumb. That's as much as you'd earn in a week and a half at that rough man's work, and it's yours for just letting me snip off what you've got too much of. The girl's bosom moved a very little. Why can't the lady send to some other girl who don't value her hair, not to me?" She exclaimed. Why, simpleton, because yours is the exact shade of her own, and is the shade you can't match by dyin', but you're not going to refuse me now, I'll come all the way from shirt and a porpoise. I say I won't sell it, to you or anybody. Now, listen, he drove a little closer beside her. The lady is very rich, and won't be particular to a few shillings, so I will advance to this on my own responsibility. I make the one sovereign, too, rather than go back empty-handed. No, no, no," she cried, beginning to be much agitated. You had attempted me, Mr. Percombe. You go on like the devil to Dr. Faustus in the penny-book. But I don't want your money, and I won't agree. Why did you come? I said when you got me into your shop and urged me so much that I didn't mean to sell my hair. The speaker was hot and stern. Marty, now harken. The lady that wants it wants it badly, and between you and me you'd better let her have it. It would be bad for you, if you don't. Bad for me? Who is she, then? The barber held his tongue, and the girl repeated the question. I'm not at liberty to tell you, and as she's going abroad soon it makes no difference who she is at all. She wants you to go abroad with it. Percombe assented by a nod. The girl regarded him reflectively. Barbara Percombe, she said, I know who it is. It's she at the house, Mrs. Charmond. That's my secret. However, if you agree to let me have it, I'll tell you in confidence. I'll certainly not let you have it unless you tell me the truth. It is Mrs. Charmond. The barber dropped his voice. Well, it is. You sat in front of her in church the other day, and she noticed how exactly your hair matched her own. Ever since then she's been hankering for it, and at last decided to get it. She won't wear it till she goes off abroad. She knows nobody will recognise the change. I'm commissioned to get her for her, and then it's to be made up. I shouldn't have vamped all these miles for any less important employer. Now mind, it is as much as my business has worked with her. If it should be known that I've let out her name. Up on her between the two of us, Marty, and you'll say nothing that would injure me. I don't wish to tell upon her, said Marty, coolly, but my hair is my own, and I'm going to keep it. Now that's not fair, after what I've told you, said the nettle barber. You see, Marty, as you are in the same parish, and in one of her cottages, then your father is ill, and wouldn't like to turn out, it would be as well to oblige her. I say it as a friend, but I won't press you to make up your mind to-night. You'll be coming to market to-morrow, I dare say, and you can call then. If you think it over, you'll be inclined to bring what I want, I know. I've nothing more to say," she answered. Her companion saw, from her manner, that it was useless to urge her further by speech. As you were a trusty young woman, he said, I'll put these sovereigns up here for ornament, that you may see how handsome they are. Bring the hair to-morrow, I'll return the sovereigns. He stuck them edgewise into the frame of a small, mantle-looking glass. I hope you'll bring it, for your sake, and mine. I should have thought she could have suited herself elsewhere, but, as tis her fancy, it must be indulged if possible. If you cut it off yourself, mind how you do it, so as you keep all the locks the one way. He showed her how this was to be done. But I shan't," she replied, with a conic indifference. I value my looks too much to spoil them. She wants my hair to get another lover with, though if stories be true, she's broke the heart of many a noble gentleman already. Lord, it's wonderful how you guess things, Marty," said the barber, or you've had it from them that know that there certainly is some foreign gentleman in her eye. However, mind what I ask. She's not going to get to him through me. Percum had retired as far as the door. He came back, planted his cane on the coffin-stool, and looked her in the face. "'Marty's out,' he said, with deliberate emphasis. "'You've got a love of yourself, and that's where you won't let it go.' She readened so intensely as to pass the mild blush that suffices to heighten beauty. She put the yellow leather glove on one hand, took up the hook with the other, and sat down doggedly to her work without turning her face to him again. He regarded her head for a moment, went to the door, and with one look back at her, departed on his way homeward. Marty pursued her occupation for a few minutes. Then suddenly laying down the bill-hook, she jumped up and went to the back of the room, where she opened a door which disclosed a staircase so whitely scrubbed that the grain of the wood was well nice sodden away by such cleansing. At the top she gently approached the bedroom, and without entering said, "'Father, do you want anything?' A weak voice inside answered in the negative, adding, "'I should be all right by tomorrow, if it were not for the tree.' The tree again, always the tree. "'Oh, Father, don't worry so about that. You know it can do you no harm.' "'Who have you had talking to you downstairs?' A shirton man called, nothing to trouble about,' she said soothingly. "'Father,' she went on, "'can Mrs. Sharman to turn us out of our house if she's minded to?' "'Turn us out?' "'No. Nobody can turn us out, for my poor soul has turned out of my body, to his life-hold, like Ambrose Winterborne's. But when my life drops to a be whores, not till then.' His words on this subject so far had been rational and firm enough, but now he lapsed into his moaning strain. "'And the tree'll do it. That tree'll soon be the death of me.' "'Nonsense, you know better. How can it be?' She refrained from further speech, and descended to the ground floor again. "'Thank heaven, then,' she said to herself, "'what belongs to me I keep.' CHAPTER III The lights in the village went out, house after house, till there only remained two in the darkness. One of these came from a residence on the hillside, of which there is nothing to say at present. The other shone from the window of Marty's south. Precisely the same outward effect was produced here, however, by her rising when the clock struck ten and hanging up a thick cloth curtain. The door it was necessary to keep a jar in hers, as in most cottages, because of the smoke. But she obviated the effect of the ribbon of light through the chink by hanging a cloth over that also. She was one of those people, who, if they have to work harder than their neighbours, prefer to keep the necessity a secret, as far as possible, and but for the slight sounds of wood splintering which came from within, no way fairer would have perceived that here the cottager did not sleep as elsewhere. XI, XII, one o'clock struck. The heap of sparrows grew higher, and the pile of chips and ends more bulky. Even the light on the hill had now been extinguished, but still she worked on. When the temperature of the night without had fallen so low as to make her chilly, she opened a large blue umbrella to ward off the draught from the door. The two sovereigns confronted her from the looking-glass in such a manner as to suggest a pair of jaunders' eyes on the watch for an opportunity. Whenever she sighed for weariness she lifted her gaze towards them, but withdrew it quickly, stroking her tresses with her fingers for a moment, as if to assure herself that they were still secure. When the clock struck three she arose and tied up the sparrows she had last made in a bundle resembling those that lay against the wall. She wrapped round her a long red woolen quivat and opened the door. The night, in all its fullness, met her flatly on the threshold, like the very brink of an absolute void, or the anti-Mundane guinean gap believed in by her chute and forefathers, for her eyes were fresh from the blaze, and here there was no street-lamp or lantern to form a kindly transition between the inner glare and the outer dark. A lingering wind brought to her ear the creaking sound of two overcrowded branches in the neighbouring wood, which were rubbing each other into wounds, and other vocalised sorrows of the trees, together with the screech of owls and the fluttering tumble of some awkward wood-pigeon, ill-balanced on its roosting bow. But the pupils of her young eyes soon expanded, and she could see well enough for her purpose. Taking a bundle of sparrows under each arm, and guided by the serrated line of treetops against the sky, she went some hundred yards or more down the lane, till she reached a long open shed, carpeted around with the dead leaves that lay throughout everywhere. Night, that strange personality, which within walls brings ominous introspectiveness and self-destrust, but under the open sky banishes such subjective anxieties as too trivial for thought, inspired by her to south with a less perturbed and brisker manner now. She lay the sparrows on the ground within the shed, and returned for more, going to and fro till her whole manufactured stock were deposited here. This erection was the wagon-house of the chief man of business hereabout, Mr. George Melbury, the timber, bark, and copseware merchant, for whom Marty's father did work of this sort by the peace. It formed one of the many rambling outhouses which surrounded his dwelling, an equally irregular block of building, whose immense chimneys could just be discerned even now. The four huge wagons under the shed were built on those ancient lines whose proportions have been ousted by modern patterns. Their shapes bulging and curving at the base and ends, like Trafalgar line of battleships, with which venerable hulks indeed, these vehicles evidence a constructed spirit curiously in harmony. One was laden with sheep-cribs, another with hurdles, another with ash-polls, and the fourth, at the foot of which she had placed earth-hatching spars, was half full of similar bundles. She was pausing for a moment with that easeful sense of accomplishment which follows work done that has been a hard struggle in the doing, when she heard a woman's voice on the other side of the head say anxiously, George! In a moment the name was repeated with, Do come in doors! What are you doing there? The cart-house adjoined the garden, and before Marty had moved she saw enter the latter from the timber-merchant's back door an elderly woman, sheltering a candle with her hand, the light from which cast a moving thorn-pattern of shade on Marty's face. The trays soon fell upon a man whose clothes were roughly thrown on, standing in advance of the speaker. He was a thin, slightly stooping figure with a small nervous mouth and a face cleanly shaven, and he walked along the path with his eyes bent on the ground. In the pair Marty self-recognize her employer, Melbury, and his wife. She was the second Mrs. Melbury, the first having died shortly after the birth of the timber-merchant's only child. There's no use to stay in bed, he said, as soon as she came up to where he was pacing restlessly about. I can't sleep. I keep thinking of things and worrying about the girl, till I'm quite in a fever of anxiety. He went on to say that he could not think why. She, Marty knew he was speaking of his daughter, did not answer his letter. She must be ill, she must certainly, he said. No, no, it is all right, George, said his wife, and she assured him that such things always did appear so gloomy in the night-time, if people allow their minds to run on them, that when morning came it was seen that such fears were nothing but shadows. Grace is as well as you are I," she declared. But he persisted that she did not see all, that she did not see as much as he. His daughter's not writing was only one part of his worry. On account of her he was anxious concerning money affairs, which he would never alarm his mind about otherwise. The reason he gave was that, as she had nobody to depend upon for a provision but himself, he wished her, when he was gone, to be securely out of risk of poverty. With this Mrs. Melbury replied that Grace would be sure to marry well, and that hence a hundred pounds more or less from him would not make much difference. Her husband said that that was what she, Mrs. Melbury, naturally thought, but there she was wrong, and in that lay the source of his trouble. I have a plan in my head about her," he said, and according to my plan she won't marry a rich man. A plan for her not to marry well," said his wife, surprised. Well, in one sense it is that, replied Melbury. It's a plan for her to marry a particular person, and as he has not so much money as she might expect, it might be called, as you call it. I may not be able to carry it out, and even if I do, it may not be a good thing for her. I want her to marry Giles Winterbourne. His companion repeated the name. Well, it is all right, she said presently. He adores the very ground she walks on. Only he's close, and won't show up much. Marty appeared startled, and could not tear herself away. Yes, the timber merchant asserted. He knew that well enough. Winterbourne had been interested in his daughter for years. That was what had led him into the notion of their union, and he knew that she used to have no objection to him. But it was not any difficulty about that which embarrassed him. It was that, since he had educated her so well and so long, and so far above the level of daughters thereabout, it was wasting her to give her to a man of no higher standing than the young man in question. "'That's what I have been thinking,' said Mrs. Melbury. "'Well, then, Lucy, now you've hit it,' answered the timbered merchant with feeling. "'There lies my trouble. I vow to let her marry him, and to make her as valuable as I could to him by schooling her as many years and as thoroughly as possible. I mean to keep my vow. I made it because I did his father a terrible wrong, and it was a weight of my conscience ever since that time till this scheme of making a man's accord to me through seeing that child later.' "'Round his father?' asked Mrs. Melbury. "'Yes, grievously wronged him,' said her husband. "'Well, don't think of it to-night, she urged. Come indoors.' "'No, no, the air cools my head. I shall not stay long.' He was silent a while. Then he told her, as nearly as Marty could gather, that his first wife, his daughter Grace's mother, was first the sweetheart of Winterborne's father, who loved her tenderly, till he, the speaker, won her away from him by a trick, because he wanted to marry her himself. He sadly went on to say that the other man's happiness was ruined by it, that though he married Winterborne's mother, it was but a half-hearted business with him. Melbury added that he was afterwards very miserable at what he had done, but that as time went on and the children grew up and seemed to be attached to each other, he determined to do all he could to right the wrong by letting his daughter marry the lad. Not only that, but to give her the best education he could afford, so as to make the gift as valuable a one as it lay in his power to bestow. "'I still mean to do it,' said Melbury. "'Then do,' said she. "'But all these things trouble me,' he said, for I feel I am sacrifice in her for my own sin, and I think of her, and often come down here to look at this.' "'Look at what?' asked his wife. He took the candle from my hand, held it to the ground, and removed a tile which lay in the garden-path. It is a track of her shoe that she made when she ran down here, the day before she went away all those months ago. I covered it up when she was gone, and when I come here and look at it, I ask myself again, why should she be sacrificed to a poor man? "'It is not altogether a sacrifice,' said the woman. He is in love with her, and he is honest and upright. If she encourages him, what can you wish for more?' "'I wish for nothing definite, but there's a lot of things possible for her. Why, Mrs. Sharman has wanted some refined young lady here to go abroad with her as companion or something of the kind. She'd jump at grace.' "'That's all uncertain. Better stick to what's sure.' "'True,' said Melbury. "'And I hope it will be for the best. Yes, let me get married as soon as I can, so as to have it all over and done with.' He continued looking at the imprint while he added. "'Suppose she should be dying, and never make a track on this path any more. She'd write soon, depend upon it. Come, she's wrong to stay here and brood so.' He admitted it, but said he could not help it. Whether she write or no, I shall fetch her in a few days. And thus speaking, he covered the track and preceded his wife indoors. Melbury perhaps was an unlucky man in having within him the sentiment which could indulge in this foolish fondness about the imprint of a daughter's footstep. Nature does not carry on her government with a view to such feelings, and when advancing years rendered the open hearts of those who possessed them less dexterous than formerly in shutting against the blast, they must suffer buffering at will by rain and storm, no less than little cellendines. But her own existence, and not Mr. Melbury's, was the centre of Marty's consciousness, and it was in relation to this that the matter struck her as she slowly withdrew. "'That, then, is the secret of it all,' she said, and Giles Winterborne is not for me, and the less I think of them the better.' She returned to her cottage. The sovereigns were staring at her from the looking-glass as she had left them. With a preoccupied countenance and with tears in her eyes she got a pair of scissors, and began mercitly cutting off the long locks of her hair, arranging and tying them with her points all one way as the barba had directed. Upon the pale, scrubbed deal of the coffin-stool table they stretched like waving and ropey weeds over the washed gravel bed of a clear stream. She could not turn again to the little looking-glass, out of humanity to herself, knowing what a deflowered visage would look back at her, and almost break her heart. She dreaded it as much as did her ancestral goddess Sif, the reflection in the pool after the rape of her locks by Locke the malicious. She steadily stuck to business, wrapped the hair in a parcel, and sealed it up, after which she raked out the fire and went to bed, having first set up an alarm made of a candle and piece of thread with a stone attached. But such a reminder was unnecessary to-night. Being tossed till about five o'clock, Marty heard the sparrows walking down their long holes in the tach above her sloping ceiling to their orifice at the eaves, whereupon she also arose and descended to the ground floor again. It was still dark, but she began moving about the house in those automatic initiatory acts and touches which represent among housewives the installation of another day. While thus engaged, she heard the rumbling of Mr. Sudbury's wagons, and knew that there too the day's toil had begun. An armful of gads thrown on the still-hot embers caused them to blaze up cheerfully and bring her diminished headgear into sudden prominence as a shadow. At this, a step approached the door. "'Aren't the folks' door yet?' inquired a voice she knew well. "'Yes, Mr. Winterborne,' said Marty, throwing on a tilt-bonnet which completely hid the recent ravages of the scissors. Come in!' The door was slung back, and there stepped in upon the mat, a man not particularly young for a lover, nor particularly mature for a person of affairs. There was reserve in his glance, and restraint upon his mouth. He carried a horn lantern which hung upon a swivel, and, wheeling as a dangled marked grotesque shape upon the shadier part of the walls. He said that he had looked it on his way down to tell her that they did not expect her father to make up his contract if he was not well. Mr. Melbury would give him another week, and it would go their journey with a short load that day. "'They are done,' said Marty, and lying in the cart-house. "'Done,' he repeated. "'Your father has not been too ill to work after all, then.' She made some evasive reply. I'll show you where they be if you are going down,' she added. They went out and walked together, the pattern of the air-holes in the top of the lantern, being thrown upon the mist overhead where they appeared of giant size, as if reaching the tent-shaped sky. They had no remarks to make to each other, and they uttered none. Hardly anything could be more isolated or more self-contained than the lives of these two walking here, in the lonely Antelucan hour when gray shades, material and mental, are so very gray, and yet looked at in a certain way their lonely courses form no detached design at all, but were of the pattern and the great web of human doings then weaving in both hemispheres, from the white sea to Cape Horn. The shed was reached, and she pointed out the spars. Winterborne regarded them silently, then looked at her. "'Now, Marty, I believe,' he said, and shook his head. "'What?' "'That you've done the work yourself.' "'Don't tell anybody, will you, Mr. Winterborne?' She pleaded, by way of answer. "'Because I'm afraid Mr. Melbury may refuse my work if he knows his mine.' "'But how could you learn to do it, to the trade?' "'Trade,' she said. "'I'd be bound to learn it in two hours.' "'Oh, no, you wouldn't,' missed Marty. Winterborne held down his lantern, and examined the cleanly split hazels as they lay.' "'Marty,' he said, with dry admiration, your father, with his forty years of practice, never made a spar better than that. They're too good for the tatching of houses, and they are good enough for the furniture. "'But I won't tell. Let me look at your hands, your poor hands.' He had a kindly manner of a quietly severe tone, and when she seemed reluctant to show her hands, he took hold of one and examined it as if it were his own. Her fingers were blistered. "'They'll get harder in time,' she said. "'For if father continues ill, I shall have to go on with. Now, I'll help put him in the wagon.' Winterborne, without speaking, set down his lantern, lifted her as she was about to stoop over the bundles and placed her behind them, and began throwing up the bundles himself. "'Rather than you should do it, I will,' he said. "'But the men will be here directly. Wait, Marty, whatever has happened to your head. Lord, it has shrunk to nothing. It looks like an apple-up on a gate-post.' Her heart swelled, and she could not speak. At length she managed to groan, looking on the ground. I've made myself ugly and hateful. That's what I've done.' "'No, no,' he answered. "'You've only cut your hair. I see it now.' "'Then why must you need say that about apples and gate-posts?' "'Let me see.' "'No, no,' she ran off in the gloom of the sluggish dawn. He did not attempt to follow her. When she reached her father's door she stood on the step and looked back. Mr. Melbury's men had arrived, and were loading up the spars, and their lanterns appeared from the distance at which she stood, to have one circle round them, like eyes weary with watching. She observed them for a few seconds as they set about harnessing the horses, and then went indoors. CHAPTER IV There was now a distinct manifestation of mourning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child. The villagers everywhere had already bestowed themselves, rising at this time of the year at a far less dreary hour of absolute darkness. It had been above an hour earlier, before a single bird had untucked his head, that twenty lights were struck in as many bedrooms, twenty pairs of shutters opened, and twenty pairs of eyes stretched to the sky, to forecast the weather for the day. Owls that had been catching mice in the outhouses, rabbits that had been eating the winter-greens in the gardens, and stoats that had been sucking the bloods of the rabbits, discerning that their human neighbours were on the move, discreetly withdrew from publicity, and were seen and heard no more that day. The daylight revealed a whole of Mr. Melbury's homestead, of which the wagon-sheds had been an outlying erection. It formed three sides of an open quadrangle, and consisted of all sorts of buildings, the largest and central one being the dwelling itself. The fourth side of the quadrangle was the public road. It was a dwelling-house of respectable, roomy, almost dignified aspect, which, taken with the fact that there were the remains of other such buildings thereabout, indicated that little Hintock had at some time or other been of greater importance than now, as its old name of Hintock St. Osmond also testified. The house was of no marked antiquity, yet of well-advanced age, older than a stale novelty, but no canonised antique, faded, not hoary, looking at you from the still distinct middle distance of the early Georgian time, and awakening on that account the instincts of reminiscence more decidedly than the remotor and far grander memorials, which have to speak from the misty reaches of medievalism. The faces, dress, passions, gratitudes, and revenues of the great-great grandfathers and grandmothers, who had been the first to gaze from those rectangular windows, and had stood under that keystone doorway, could be divined and measured by homely standards of to-day. It was a house in whose reverberations, queer old personal tales were yet audible, if properly listened for, and not, as with those of the castle and cloister, silent beyond the possibility of echo. The garden-front remained much as it had always been, and there was a porch and entrance that way, but the principal house-door opened on the square-yard or quadrangle towards the road, formerly a regular carriage entrance, though the middle of the area was now made use of for stacking timber, faggots, bundles, and other products of the wood. It was divided from the lane by a lichen-coated wall, in which hung a pair of gates, flanked by piers out of the perpendicular, with a round white ball on the top of each. The building on the left of the enclosure was a long back-direction, now used for spar-making, sawing, crib-framing, and cop-sware manufacture in general, opposite where the wagon-sheds where Marty had deposited her spars. Here Winterborne had remained after the girls' abrupt departure, to see that the wagon-loads were properly made up. Winterborne was connected with the Melbury family in various ways. In addition to the sentimental relationship which arose from his father having been the first Mrs. Melbury's lover, Winterborne's aunt had married and emigrated with the brother of the timber-merchant many years before, an alliance that was sufficient to place Winterborne, though the poorer, on a footing of social intimacy with the Melbury's. As in most villages so secluded as this, intermarriages were of Habsburgian frequency among the inhabitants, and there were hardly two houses in Little Hintock unrelated by some matrimonial tie or other. For this reason a curious kind of partnership existed between Melbury and the younger man, a partnership based upon an unwritten code by which each acted in the way he thought fair towards the other, on a give-and-take principle. Melbury, with his timber-and-cop-sware business, found that the weight of his labour came in winter and spring. Winterborne was in the apple-insider trade, and his requirements in cartage and other work came in the autumn of each year. Hence horses, wagons, and in some degree men, were handed over to him when the apples began to fall, he in return lending his assistance to Melbury in the busiest wood-cutting season as now. Before he had left the shed a boy came from the house to ask him to remain till Mr. Melbury had seen him. Winterborne, thereupon crossed over to the spar-house, where two or three men were already at work, two of them being travelling spar-makers from Whiteheart Lane, who, when this kind of work began, made their appearance regularly, and when it was over, disappeared in silence till the season came again. Firewood was the one thing abundant in little Hintock, and a blaze of gad-cuds made the out-house gay with its light, which vied with that of the day as yet. In the hollow shades of the roof could be seen dangling, etiolated arms of ivy which had crept through the joints of the tiles, and were groping in vain for some support, their leaves being dwarfed and sickly for want of sunlight. Others were pushing in with such force at the ease as to lift from their supports the shells that were fixed there. Besides the itinerant journey-workers there were also present John Up John, engaged in the hollow ternary trade, who lived hard by. Old timity-tangs and young timity-tangs, top-and-bottom sawers, at work in Mr. Melbury's pit outside. Mark Baughtry, who kept the cider-house, and Robert Creadle, an old man who worked for Winterborn, and stood warming his hands. These latter being enticed in by the ruddy blaze, though they had no particular business there. None of them called for any remark except perhaps Creadle. To have completely described them it would have been necessary to write a military memoir, for he wore under his smock-flock a cast-off soldier's jacket, that had seen hot service, his collar showing just above the flap of the frock, also a hunting-memoir, to include the top-boots that he had picked up by chance. Also chronicles of voyaging and ship-wreck for his pocket-knife had been given him by a weather-beaten sailor, but Creadle carried about with him on his uneventful rounds these silent testimonies of war, sport, and adventure, and taught nothing of their associations or their stories. Cops' work, as it was called, being an occupation which to secondary intelligence of the hands and arms could carry on without acquiring the sovereign attention of the head, the minds of its professors wandered considerably from the objects before them, hence the tales, chronicles, and ramifications of family history which were recounted here were of a very exhaust of kind, and sometimes so interminable as to defy description. Winterborne, seeing that Melbury had not arrived, stepped back again outside the door, and the conversation, interrupted by his momentary presence, flowed anew, reaching his ears as an accompaniment to the regular dripping of the fog from the plantation boughs around. The topic at present handled was a highly popular and frequent one, the personal character of Mrs. Charmond, the owner of the surrounding woods and groves. "'My brother-in-law told me, and I have no reason to doubt it,' said Creadle, that she'd sit down to her dinner with a frock hardly higher than her elbows. "'Oh, you wicked woman,' he said to himself when he first saw her, you go to church and sit and kneel as if your knee joints were greased with very saint's ointment, and tell off your hero's good laws like a businessman counting money, and yet you can eat your figtual such a figure as that. Whether she's a reformed character by this time I can't say, boy don't care who the man is, that's how she went on when my brother-in-law lived there. Did she do it in her husband's time?' "'That I don't know, hardly I should think, considering his temper. Ah!' Here Creadle threw grieved remembrance to physical form by slowly resigning his head to obliquity and letting his eyes water. "'That man, not if the angels of heaven came down, Creadle,' he said, "'Shall you do another day's work for me?' "'Yes, he'd say anything—anything—and would as soon take a winged creature's name and vein as yours on mine. Well, now I must get these spars home along, and to-morrow thank God I must see about using them.' An old woman now entered upon the scene. She was Mr. Melbury's servant, and passed a great part of her time in crossing the yard between the house-door and the spar-shed, whither she had now come for fuel. She had two facial aspects—one of a soft and flexible kind she used indoors when assisting about the parlour or upstairs, the other with stiff lines and corners, when she was bustling among the men in the spar-house or out of doors. "'Ah! Grammar Oliver,' said John up John, "'It to do my heart good to see an old woman like you so dapper and storing, when I bear in mind that after fifty one year counts as two did before. For your smoke didn't rise this morning till twenty minutes past seven by my beater, and that's late, Grammar Oliver. If you was a full-size man, John, people might take nose of yours gone for meanings, but your growing up was such a scrimped and scanty business that really a woman couldn't feel hurt if you were to spit fire and brimstone itself at her. Here she added, holding out a spar-guard to one of the workmen, from which dangled a long black pudding. Here's something for thy breakfast, and if you want to, you must fetch it from indoors. "'Mr. Melbury is late this morning,' said the bottom soar. "'Yes, it was a dark dawn,' said Mrs. Oliver. "'Even when I opened the door, so late as I was, you couldn't have told poor men from gentlemen, or John, from a reasonable sized object, and I don't think master slept at all well to-night, he's anxious about his daughter, and I know what that is, for I've cried book-a-fools for my own.' When the old woman had gone, Creedle said, "'He'll fret as gizzard-green if he don't soon hear from that maid of his. Well, learning is better than houses and lands. But to keep a maid at school, till she's taller, out of patterns than her mother was in them, till she's tempted in Providence. It seems no time ago that she was a little playward thing,' said young Timothy Tangs. "'I can mind a mother,' said the hollow-turner. "'Always a tuney, delicate piece. Her touch upon your hand was as soft and cool as wind. She was inoculated for the smallpox, and had it beautifully fine, just about the time that I was out on my apprenticeship. I, and along apprenticeship toise, I served that master of mine six years and three hundred and fourteen days.' The hollow-turner pronounced the days with emphasis, as if considering their number, they were a rather more remarkable fact than the years. Mr. Wintermont's father walked her at a one time, said old Timothy Tangs, but Mr. Melbury won her. She was a child of a woman, and would cry like rain if so be he huffed her. Whenever she and her husband came to a puddle in their walks together, he'd take her up like a hapeny doll, and put her over without dirty in her respect. And if he keeps the daughter so long aboard in school, he'll make her as nesh as her mother was, and but here he comes.' Just before this moment Wintermont had seen Melbury crossing the court from his door. He was carrying an open letter in his hand, and came straight to Wintermont. His gloom of the preceding night had quite gone. I'd no sooner made up my mind-giles to go and see why Grace didn't comb my right, than I'd get a letter from her. Lifton, Wednesday, my dear father, says she, I'm coming home to-morrow, that's to-day, but I didn't take it worth my while to write long beforehand. They're a little rascal, and didn't she? Now, giles, as you were going to Sherton Market to-day with your apple-trees, why not join me in Grace there, and we'd drive home all together? He made the proposal with cheerful energy. He was hardly the same man as the man of the small dark hours. However it happens that among the moodiest the tendency to be cheered is stronger than the tendency to be cast down, and a sole specific gravity stands apparently less than that of the sea of troubles into which it is thrown. Winterborn, though not demonstrative, replied to this suggestion with something like a lacquery. There was not much doubt that Marty's grounds for cutting off her hair was substantial enough if this man's eyes had been a reason for keeping it on. As for the timber-merchant, it was plain that his invitation had been given solely in pursuance of a scheme for uniting the pair. He had made up his mind to the course as a duty, and was strenuously bent upon following it out. Accompanied by Winterborn, he now turned towards the door of the spar-house, when his footsteps were heard by the man as aforesaid. Well, John, and Lot, he said, nodding as he entered, "'I'll rhyme me mornin'.' "'It is, sir,' said Creadle, energetically. For not having as yet been able to summon force sufficient to go away and begin work, he felt a necessity of throwing some into his speech. But don't care who the man is, it is the rhymeiest mornin' we've had this fall. I heard you wonderin' why I kept my daughter so long a boarding school,' resumed Mr. Melbury, looking up from the letter which you was reading anew by the fire, and turning to them with the suddenness that was a trait in him. "'Kay,' he asked, with effected shrewdness, "'but you did, you know?' "'Well, now, though it is my own business, more than anybody else's, I'll tell you. When I was a boy, another boy, the parson's son, along with a lot of others, asked me, who dragged whom round the walls of what? And I said, Sam Barrett, who dragged his wife in a chair round the tower-corner when she went to be churched. They laughed at me with such torrents of scorn that I went home ashamed, and couldn't sleep for shame. And I cried that night till my pillow was wet. Till at last I taught to myself, there and then. They may laugh at me for my ignorance, but that was father's fault, and none of my makin', and I must bear it. But they shall never laugh at my children if I have any. I'll starve first. Thank God I've been able to keep her at school without sacrifice, and her scholarship is such that she stayed on as governance for a time. Let them laugh now if they can. This charmant herself is not better informed on my girl Grace. There was something between high indifference and humble emotion in his delivery, which made it difficult for them to reply. Winterborne's interest was of a kind which did not show itself in words, listening, as he stood by the fire, mechanically stirring the embers with the spar-gad. You be, then, ready, joyles! Melbury continued, awaking from her reverie. Well, what was the latest news at Shotford yesterday, Mr. Bautry? Well, Shotford is Shotford still. You can't victualy a carcass there unless you've got money, and you can't buy a cup of genuine there, whether or no. But as the saying is, go abroad and you'll hear news from home. It seems that our new neighbour, this young doctor, what's his name, is a strange, deep, perusing gentleman, and there's good reason for supposing he has sold his soul to the wicked one. God name it all, murmured the timber-merchant, unimpressed by the news, but reminded of other things by the subject of it. I've got to meet a gentleman this very morning, and yet I've planned to go to Shirt and Abbas for the maid. I won't praise a doctor's wisdom till I hear what sort of bargain he's made, said the topsoar. It is only an old woman's tale, said Bautry, but it seems that he wanted certain books on some mysterious science or black art, and in order that the people hear about should not know anything about his dark readings, he ordered them direct from London, and not from the Shirt and Bookseller. The parcel was delivered by mistake at the Parsons, and he wasn't at home, so his wife opened it, and went into hysterics when she read them, thinking her husband had torn heathen, and would be the ruin of the children. But when he came, he said he knew no more about them than she, and found there were dismissed her Fitzpiers's property. So he wrote, Beware, outside, and sent them on by the sexton. He must be a curious young man, mused a hollow torner. He must, said Timothy Tangs. Nonsense, said Mr. Melbury authoritatively. He's only a gentleman fond of science and philosophy and poetry, and in fact every kind of knowledge, and being lonely here he passes his time in making such matters his hobby. Well, said old Timothy, it is a strange thing about doctors that the worse they be, the better they be. I mean that if you hear anything of this sort about them, ten to one they can cure you as nobody else can. True, said Bortrie emphatically, and for my part I shall take my custom from old Jones, and go to this one directly of anything that matter with me. The last medicine old Jones gave me had no taste in it at all. Mr. Melbury has become a well-informed man, did not listen to these recitals, being more over preoccupied with the business appointment which had come into his head. He walked up and down looking on the floor, his usual custom when undecided. That stiffness about the arm, hip, and knee-joint, which was apparent when he walked, was the net product of the diverse brains and overexertions that had been required of him in handling trees and timber when a young man. For he was of the sort called self-made, and had worked hard. He knew the origins of every one of these cramps. That in his left shoulder had come of carrying a pollard, unassisted, from Tutcom Bottom home. That in one leg was caused by the crash of an elm against it when they were felling. That in the other was from lifting a bowl. On many a morrow, after wearing himself by these prodigious muscular efforts, he had risen from his bed fresh as usual. His lassitude had departed, apparently, forever, and confident in the recuperative power of his youth he had repeated the strains anew. But treacherous time had been only hiding ill results when they could be guarded against, for greater accumulation when they could not. In his declining years the store had been unfolded in the form of rheumatism, pricks, and spasms in every one of which Melbury recognized some act which, had its consequence been contemporaneously made known, he would wisely have abstained from repeating. On a summons by Grammar Oliver to breakfast he left the shed. Reaching the kitchen where the family breakfasted in winter to save house labour, he sat down by the fire, and looked a long time at the pair of dancing shadows, cast by each fire-iron and dog-knob on the white-washed chimney-corner, a yellow one from the window and a blue one from the fire. I don't quite know what to do to-day, he said to his wife at last. I recollected that I promised to meet Mrs. Charmond Stewart in round wood at twelve o'clock, and yet I want to go for grace. Why not let Giles fetch her by himself? It would bring him together all the quicker. I could do that, but I should like to go myself. I always have gone without fail every time hitherto. It has been a great pleasure to drive to Sherton and wait to see her arrive, and perhaps she be disappointed if I stay away. Yon may be disappointed, but I don't think she will if you send Giles, said Mrs. Melbury, dryly. Very well, I'll send them. Melbury was often persuaded by the quietude of his wife's words when strenuous argument would have had no effect. This second Mrs. Melbury was a placid woman who had been nursed to his child Grace before her mother's death. After that melancholy event little Grace had plung to the nurse with much affection, and ultimately Melbury, in dread lest the only woman who cared for the girl should be induced to leave her, persuaded the mild Lucy to marry him. The arrangement, for it with little more, had worked satisfactorily enough. Grace had thriven, and Melbury had not repented. He returned to the spar-house and found Giles near at hand, to whom he explained the change of plan. As she won't arrive till five o'clock, you can get your business very well over in time to receive her, said Melbury. The green gig will do for her. You'll spin along quicker than that, and won't be late upon the road. Her boxes can be called for by one of the wagons. Winterborne, knowing nothing of the timber-merchants' restitutory aims, quietly thought all this to be a kindly chance, wishing even more than her father to dispatch his apple-tree business in the market before Grace's arrival, he prepared to start at once. Melbury was careful that a turnout should be seemly. The gig-wheels, for instance, were not always washed during wintertime before a journey, the muddy roads rendering that labour useless. But they were washed to-day. The harness was blacked, and when the rather elderly white horse had been put in, and Winterborne was in his seat ready to start, Mr. Melbury stepped out with a blacking-brush, and with his own hands touched over the yellow huffs of the animal. You see, Giles, he said, as he blacked. Coming from a fashionable school, she might feel shocked at the homeliness of home, and his these little things that catch a dainty woman's eye, if they are neglected. We, living here alone, don't notice how the whitey-brown creeps out of the air to over us, but she, fresh from the city, hope why she'll notice everything. And that she will, said Giles, and scorn us if we don't mind. Not scorn us. No, no, no, that's only words. She's too good a girl to do that. But when we consider what she knows, and what she has seen since she last saw us, it is as well to me her views as nearly as possible. Wait, to the years since she was in this old place, owing to her going abroad in the summer, which I agreed to, thinking it best for her. And naturally we shall look small, just at first, I only say just at first. Mr. Melbury's tone evinced a certain exultation in the very sense of that inferiority he effected to deplore. For this advanced and refined being, was she not his own all the time? Not so Giles, he felt doubtful, perhaps a trifle cynical, for that strand was wound to him with the rest. He looked at his clothes with misgiving, then with indifference. It was his custom during the planting season to carry a specimen apple-tree to market with him, as an advertisement of what he dealt in. This had been tied across the gig, and as it would be left behind in town, it would cause no inconvenience to miss Grace Melbury coming home. He drove away, the twigs nodding with each step of the horse, and Melbury went indoors. Before the gig had passed out of sight, Mr. Melbury reappeared and shouted after. Here, Giles! He said breathlessly following with some raps. It may be very chilly to-night, and she may want something extra about her. And Giles. He added, when the young man, having taken the articles, put the horse in motion once more, tell her that I should have come myself, but I had particular business with Mrs. Charman's agent which prevented me. Don't forget. He watched Wintermoren out of sight, saying, with a jerk, a shape into which emotion with him often resolved itself. There, now, I hope the two will bring it to a point and have done with it. It is a pity to let such a girl throw herself away upon him. A thousand pities, and yet it is my duty for his father's sake. Without elation and without this composure. Had he regarded his inner self spectacularly, as lovers are now daily more want to do, he might have felt pride in the discernment of a somewhat rare power in him, that of keeping not only judgment but emotion suspended in difficult cases. But he noted it not. Neither did he observe what was also the fact, that, though he cherished a true and warm feeling towards Grace Melbury, he was not altogether her fool just now. It must be remembered that he had not seen her for a year. Arrived at the entrance to a long, flat lane, which had taken the spirit out of many a pedestrian in times when, with the majority, to travel meant to walk, he saw before him the trim figure of a young woman in patents, journeying with that steadfast concentration which means purpose and not pleasure. He was soon near enough to see that she was Marty South. Click, click, click, went to patents, and she did not turn her head. She had, however, become aware before this that the driver of the approaching gig was Giles. She had shrunk from being overtaken by him thus, but as it was inevitable, she had braced herself up for his inspection, by closing her lips so as to make her mouth quite unemotional, and by throwing an additional firmness into her tread. While he wore patents, Marty, the turnpike is clean enough, although the lanes are muddy. They saved my boots. But twelve miles in patents? To twist your feet off! Come, get up and ride with me. She hesitated, removed her patents, knocked the gravel out of them against the wheel, and mounted in front of the nodding specimen apple-tree. She had so arranged her bonnet, with a full border and trimmings, that her lack of long hair did not much injure her appearance, though Giles, of course, saw that it was gone, and may have guessed her motive in parting with it, such sales, though infrequent, not being unheard of in that locality. But nature's adornment was still hard by, in fact within two feet of them, though he did not know it. In Marty's basket was a brown paper packet, and in the packet the chestnut locks, which, by reason of the barber's request for secrecy, she had not ventured to entrust into other hands. Giles asked, with some hesitation, how her father was getting on. He was better, she said, but he would be able to work in a day or two. He would be quite well, but for his craze about the tree falling on him. You know why I don't ask from so often as I might, I suppose, said Winterborne, or don't you know? I think I do. Because of the houses. She nodded. Yes, I'm afraid of my seam that my anxiety is about the houses, which I should lose by his death more than about him. Marty, I do feel anxious about the houses, since half my income depends upon them, but I do likewise care for him, and it almost seems wrong that houses should be leased for lives, so as to lead to such mixed feelings. After father's death there will be Mrs. Sharman's. There'll be hers. They're going to keep company with my hair, she thought. Thus talking they reached the town. By no pressure would she ride up the street with him. That's the rate of another woman, she said, with playful malice, as she put on her patents. They wonder what you were thinking of. Thank you for the lift and that handsome gig. Goodbye. He blushed a little, shook his head at her, and drove on ahead into the streets. The churches, the abbey, and other buildings on this clear, bright morning, having the liney distinctness of architectural drawings. As if the original dream and vision of the conceiving master Mason, some medieval villers are other unknown to fame, where for a few minutes flashed down through the centuries to an unappreciative age. Giles saw the relicant look on this day of transparency, but could not construe it. He turned into the in-yard. Marty, following the same track, marched promptly to the hairdressers, Mr. Percombe. Percombe was the chief of his trade in Sherton Abbas. He had the patronage of such county offshoots as had been obliged to seek the shelter of small houses in that ancient town, of the local clergy, and so on, for some of whom he had made wigs, while others among them had compensated for neglecting him in their lifetime, by patronizing him when they were dead, and letting him shave their corpses. On the strength of all this he had taken down his pole, and called himself Periquiaire to the aristocracy. Nevertheless, this sort of support did not quite fill his children's mouths, and they had to be filled. So behind his house there was a little yard, reached by a passage from the back street, and in that yard was a pole, and under the pole a shop of quite another description than the ornamental one in the front street. Here, on Saturday nights from seven till ten, he took an almost innumerable succession of tupenses from the farm-labours who flocked thither in crowds from the country, and thus he lived. Marty, of course, went to the front shop, and handed her packet to him silently. Thank you! said the barber quite joyfully, and he hardly expected it after what you said last night. She turned aside, while a tear welled up and stood in each eye at this reminder. Nothing of what I told you, he whispered, there being others in the shop, but I can trust you, I see. She had now reached the end of this distressing business, and went listlessly along the street to attend to other errands. These occupied her till four o'clock, at which time she recrossed the marketplace. It was impossible to avoid rediscovering Winterborne every time she passed that way, for standing as he always did at this season of the year, with his specimen apple-tree in the midst, the boughs rose above the heads of the crowd and brought a delightful suggestion of orchards among the crowded buildings there. When her eye fell upon him for the last time he was standing somewhat apart, holding the tree like an ensign, and looking on the ground instead of pushing his produce as he ought to have been doing. He was, in fact, not a very successful seller, either of his trees or of his cider, his habit of speaking his mind when he spoke at all, militating against this branch of his business. While she regarded him he suddenly lifted his eyes, in a direction away from Marty, his face simultaneously kindling with recognition and surprise. She followed his gaze, and saw walking across to him a flexible young creature, in whom she perceived the features of her she had known as Miss Grace Melbury, but now looking glorified and refined above her former level. Winterborne, being fixed to the spot by his apple-tree, could not advance to meet her. He held out his spare hand with his hat in it, and with some embarrassment, beheld her coming on tiptoe through the mud to the middle of the square where he stood. Miss Melbury's arrival so early was, as Marty could see, unexpected by Giles, which accounted for his not being ready to receive her. Indeed, her father had named five o'clock as her probable time, for which reason that hour had been looming out all the day in his forward perspective, like an important edifice on a plane. Now here she was come he knew not how, and his arranged welcome stultified. His face became gloomy at a necessity for stepping into the road, and more still at a little look of embarrassment which appeared on hers, at having to perform the meeting with him under an apple-tree ten feet high, in the middle of a market-place. Having had occasion to take off the new glove she had bought to come home in, she held out to him a hand radiating from pink at the tips of the fingers to white at the palm, and the reception formed a scene, with the tree over their heads, which was not by any means an ordinary one in Sherton Abba's streets. Nevertheless the greeting on her looks and lips was of a restrained type, which perhaps was not unnatural, for true it was that Giles Winterborne, well attired and well mannered as he was for a yeoman, looked rough beside her. It had sometimes dimly occurred to him in his ruminating silence at little hintock, that external phenomena, such as the lowness or height or colour of a hat, the fold of a coat, the make of a boot, or the chance attitude or occupation of a limb at the instant of view, may have a great influence upon feminine opinion of a man's worth, so frequently founded on non-essentials. But a certain causticity of mental tone towards himself and the world in general had prevented today, as always, any enthusiastic action on the strength of that reflection, and her momentary instinct of reserve at first sight of him, was the penalty he paid for his laxness. He gave away the tree to a bystander, as soon as he could find one who would accept the cumbersome gift, and the twain moved on towards the inn at which he had put up. Marty made as if to step forward for the pleasure of being recognised by Miss Melbury, but abruptly checking herself she glided behind a carrier's van, saying dryly, no, I bain't wanted there, and critically regarded Winterborne's companion. It would have been very difficult to describe Grace Melbury with precision, either now or at any time. Nay, from the highest point of view, to precisely describe a human being, the focus of a universe, how impossible. But apart from transcendentalism, there never probably lived a person who was in herself more completely a reductio ad absurdum of attempts to appraise a woman, even externally by items of face and figure. Speaking generally, it may be said that she was sometimes beautiful, at other times not beautiful according to the state of her health and spirits. In simple corporeal presentiment she was of a fair and clear complexion, rather pale than pink, slim in build and elastic in movement. Her look expressed a tendency to wait for others' thoughts before uttering her own, and possibly also to wait for others' deeds before her own doing. In her small, delicate mouth, which had perhaps hardly settled down to its matured curves, there was a gentleness that might hinder sufficient self-assertion for her own good. She had well-formed eyebrows, which, had her portrait been painted, would probably have been done in prouts or van dyke-brown. There was nothing remarkable in her dress just now, beyond a natural fitness and style that was recent in the streets of Sherton, but indeed, had it been the reverse and quite striking, it would have meant just as little. For there can be hardly anything less connected with a woman's personality, than drapery which she has neither designed, manufactured, cut, sewed, or even seen, except by a glance of approval when told that such and such a shape and colour must be had, because it has been decided by others as imperative at that particular time. What people therefore saw of her in a cursory view was very little. In truth, mainly something that was not she. The woman herself was a shadowy, conjectural creature, who had little to do with the outlines presented to Sherton eyes. A shape in the gloom, whose true description could only be approximated by putting together a movement now and a glance then, in that patient and long-continued attentiveness, which nothing but watchful loving-kindness ever troubles to give. There was a little delay in their setting out from the town, and Marty South took advantage of it to hasten forward, with the view of escaping them on the way, lest they should feel compelled to spoil their tete-a-tete by asking her to ride. She walked fast, and one third of the journey was done, and the evening rapidly darkening, before she perceived any sign of them behind her. Then, while ascending a hill, she dimly saw their vehicle drawing near the lowest part of the incline, their heads slightly bent towards each other, drawn together, no doubt, by their souls, as the heads of a pair of horses well in hand are drawn in by the rain. She walked still faster. But between these and herself there was a carriage, apparently a brawn coming in the same direction, with lighted lamps. When it overtook her, which was not soon on account of her pace, the scene was much darker, and the lights glared in her eyes sufficiently to hide the details of the equipage. It occurred to Marty that she might take hold behind this carriage, and so keep along with it, to save herself the modification of being overtaken and picked up for pity's sake by the oncoming pair. Accordingly, as the carriage drew abreast of her in climbing in the long ascent, she walked close to the wheels, the rays of the nearest lamp penetrating her very paws. She had only just dropped behind when the carriage stopped, and to her surprise the coachman asked her over his shoulder if she would ride. What made the question more surprising was that it came in obedience to an order from the inside of the vehicle. Marty gladly assented, for she was weary, very weary, after working all night and keeping a foot all day. She mounted beside the coachman, wondering why this good fortune had happened to her. He was rather a great man in aspect, and she did not like to inquire of him for some time. At last she said, Who has been so kind as to ask me to ride? Mrs. Charmond replied her statuesque companion. Marty was stirred at the name, so closely connected with her last night's experiences. Is this her carriage? She whispered. Yes, she's inside. Marty reflected, and perceived that Mrs. Charmond must have recognized her plodding up the hill under the blaze of the lamp, recognized probably her stubbly pawl, since she had kept away her face, and thought that those stubbles were the result of her own desire. Marty's out was not very far wrong. Inside the carriage a pair of bright eyes looked from a ripely handsome face, and though behind those bright eyes was a mind of unfathom mysteries, beneath them there beat a heart capable of quick extemporary warmth, a heart which could indeed be passionately and imprudently warm on certain occasions. At present, after recognizing the girl, she had acted on a mere impulse, possibly feeling gratified at the denuded appearance which signified the success of her agent in obtaining what she had required. It is wonderful that she should ask you, observes a magisterial coachman presently, who had never known her to do before, for as a rule she takes no interest in the village folk at all. Marty said no more, but occasionally turned her head to see if she could get a glimpse of the Olympian creature, who, as the coachman had truly observed, hardly ever descended from her clouds into the temper of the parishioners. But she could discern nothing of the lady. She also looked for Miss Melbury in Winterborne. The nose of their horse sometimes came quite near to the back of Mrs. Charmond's carriage, but they never attempted to pass it till the latter conveyance turned towards the park gate, when they sped by. Here the carriage drew up that the gate might be opened, and in the momentary silence Marty heard a gentle oral sound, soft as a breeze. What's that? She whispered. Mrs. Yawning. Why should she yawn? Oh, because she'd been used to such wonderfully good life and finds it dull here. She'll soon be off again on account of it. So rich and so powerful, and yet to yawn, the girl murmured. Then things don't fail with she any more than with we. Marty now alighted. The lamp again shone upon her as the carriage rolled on, and a soft voice said to her from the interior. Good night. Good night, ma'am, said Marty, but she had not been able to see the woman who began so greatly to interest her. The second person of her own sex who had operated strongly on her mind that day. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Meanwhile Winterborne and Grace Melbury had also undergone their little experiences of the same homeward journey. As he drove off with her out of the town, the glances of people fell upon them, the younger thinking that Mr. Winterborne was in a pleasant place, and wondering in what relation he stood towards her. Winterborne himself was unconscious of this. Occupied solely with the idea of having her in charge, he did not notice much with outward eye, neither observing how she was dressed nor the effect of the picture they together composed in the landscape. Their conversation was in the briefest phrase for some time, Grace being somewhat disconcerted, through not having understood till they were about to start, that Giles was to be her sole conductor in place of her father. When they were in the open country he spoke, Don't brownly's farm-buildings look strange to you, now that they have been moved bodily from the hollow where the old one stood, to the top of the hill. She admitted that they did, though she should not have seen any difference in them if he had not pointed it out. They had a good crop of bittersweet, they couldn't grind them all. Nodding towards an orchard where some heaps of apples had been left lying ever since the in-gathering. She said, yes, but looking at another orchard. Why, you're looking at John-Apple-trees. You know bittersweet, you're used to well enough. I am afraid I have forgotten, and it is getting too dark to distinguish. Winterborne did not continue. It seemed as if the knowledge and the interests which had formerly moved Grace's mind had quite died away from her. He wondered whether the special attributes of his image in the past had evaporated like these other things. However, that might be the fact that present was merely this, that where he was seeing John-Apple-trees and farm-buildings, she was beholding a far remotor scene, a scene no less innocent and simple indeed, but much contrasting. A broad lawn and a fashionable suburb of a fast city, the evergreen leaves shining in the evening sun, amid which bounding girls gracefully clad in artistic arrangements of blue, brown, red, black and white, were playing at games with laughter and chat, in all the pride of life, the notes of a piano and harp trembling in the air from the open windows adjoining. Moreover, they were girls, and this was a fact which Grace Melbury's delicate femininity could not lose sight of, whose parents' giles would have addressed with the deferential sir or madam. Beside this vision scene, the homely farm-sets did not quite hold their own from her present twenty-year point of survey. For all his woodland sequestration, Giles knew the primitive simplicity of the subject he had started, and now sounded a deeper note. It was very odd what we said to each other years ago. We often think of it. I mean our saying that if we still liked each other when you were twenty, and I twenty-five, we'd—that was Giles' tattle. Hmm! said Giles suddenly. I mean we were young. She said more considerably. That gruff manner of his in making inquiries reminded her that he was unaltered in much. Yes, I beg your pardon, Miss Melbury. Your father sent me to meet you to-day. I know it, and I'm glad of it. He seemed satisfied with her tone and went on. At that time you were sitting beside me at the back of your father's covered car, when we were coming home from gypsying, all the party being squeezed in together as tight as sheep in an auction-pen. It got darker and darker, and I said—I forget the exact words—but I put my arm around your waist. And there you let it stay till your father, sitting in front, suddenly stopped telling his story to Farmer Bolland to light his pipe. The flash shone into the car, and showed us all up distinctly. My arm flew from your waist like lightning, yet not so quickly, but that some of them had seen and laughed at us. Yet your father, to our own amazement, instead of being angry, was mild as milk, and seemed quite pleased. Have you forgotten all that, or haven't you? She owned that she remembered it very well, now that he mentioned the circumstances. But, goodness, I must have been in short frocks, she said. Come now, Miss Melbury, that won't do. Short frocks, indeed. You know better as well as I." Grace thereupon declared that she would not argue with an old friend she valued so highly as she valued him, saying the words with the easy elusiveness that will be polite at all costs. It might possibly be true, she added, that she was getting on in girlhood when that event took place, but if it were so, then she was virtually no less than an old woman now, so far that the time seemed removed from her present. Do you ever look at things philosophically, instead of personally, she asked? I can't say that I do, answered Giles, his eyes lingering far ahead upon a dark spot, which proved to be a braum. I think you may, sometimes, with advantage, said she. Look at yourself as a pitcher drifting on the stream with other pitchers, and consider what contrivances are most desirable for avoiding cracks in general, and not only for saving your poor one. Shall I tell you all about Bath or Cheltenham, or places on the continent that I have visited last summer? With all my heart. Then she described places and persons in such terms as might have been used for that purpose by any woman to any man within the Four Seas. So entirely absent from that description was everything specially appertaining to her own existence. And when she had done, she said gaily, now, do you tell me in return what has happened in Hintock since I have been away? Anything to keep the conversation away from horror me, said Giles within him. It was true cultivation had so far advanced in the soil of Miss Melbury's mind, as to lead her to talk by rote of anything save of that she knew well, and had the greatest interest in developing, that is, to say herself. He had not proceeded far with his somewhat bald narration when they drew near the carriage that had been preceding them for some time. Miss Melbury inquired if he knew whose carriage it was. Winterborne, although he had seen it, had not taken it into account. On examination he said it was Mrs. Charmonds. Grace watched the vehicle, and its easy roll, and seemed to feel more nearly akin to it than to the one she was in. Pfft, we can polish off the mileage as well as they, come to that, said Winterborne, reading her mind, and rising to emulation that what had bespoke he whipped on the horse. This it was which had brought the nose of Mr. Melbury's old grey close to the back of Mrs. Charmonds' much eclipsing vehicle. There's Marty South sitting up with the coachman, he said, discerning her by her dress. Ah, poor Marty! I must ask her to come to see me this very evening. How does she happen to be riding there? I don't know, it's very singular. Thus these people with converging destinies went along the road together. Till Winterborne, leaving the track of the carriage, turned into little Hintock, where almost the first house was the timber-merchants. Pencils of dancing lights dreamed out of the windows sufficiently to show the white lorestinous flowers, and glance over the polished leaves of laurel. The interior of the rooms could be seen distinctly warmed up by the fire-flames, which in the parlour were reflected from the glass of the pictures and book-case, and in the kitchen from the utensils and ware. Let us look at the dear place for a moment before we call them, she said. In the kitchen dinner was preparing, for though Melbury dined at one o'clock at other times, to-day the meal had been kept back for grace. A rickety old spit was in motion, its end being fixed in the fire-dog, and the hole kept going by means of a cord, conveyed over pulleys along the ceiling to a large stone suspended in the corner of the room. Old Grammar Oliver came in and wound it up with a rattle like that of a mill. In the parlour a large shade of Mrs. Melbury's head fell on the wall and ceiling. But before the girl had regarded this room many moments their presence was discovered, and her father and stepmother came out to welcome her. The characters of the Melbury family was of that kind which evinces some shyness in showing strong emotion among each other, a trait frequent in rural households, and one which stands in curiously inverse relation to most of the peculiarities distinguishing villagers from the people of towns. Thus hiding their warmer feelings under their commonplace talk all round, Grace's reception produced no extraordinary demonstrations. But that more was felt than was enacted appeared from the fact that her father, in taking her indoors, quite forgot the presence of Giles without, as did also Grace herself. He said nothing, but took the gig around to the yard, and called out from the spar-house the man who particularly attended it to these matters when there was no conversation to draw him off among the cop's workers inside. Winterborne then returned to the door with the intention of entering the house. The family had gone into the parlour, and were still absorbed in themselves. The fire was, as before, the only light, and it irradiated Grace's face and hands, so as to make them look wondrously smooth and fair besides those of the two elders, shining also through the loose hair about her temples, as sunlight through a break. Her father was surveying her in a dazed conjecture, so much that she developed and progressed in manner and stature since he had last said eyes on her. Observing these things, Winterborne remained dubious by the door, mechanically tracing with his fingers certain time-worn letters carved under jams, initials of bygone generations of householders who had lived and died there. No, he declared to himself, he would not enter and join the family. They had forgotten them, and it was enough for today that he had brought her home. Still, he was a little surprised that her father's eagerness to send them for Grace should have resulted in such an anticlimax as this. He walked softly away into the lane towards his own house, looking back when he reached the turning, from which he could get a last glimpse of the timber-merchant's roof. He hazarded guesses as to what Grace was saying just at that moment, and murmured with some self-derision. Nothing about me. He looked also in the other direction, and saw against the sky the attached hip and solitary chimney of Marty's cottage, and thought of her, too, struggling bravely along under that humble shelter among her spar-gads and pots and skimmers. At the timber-merchant's in the meantime the conversation flowed, and as Giles Winterborne had rightly enough deemed, on subjects in which he had no share. Among the excluding matters there was, for one, the effect upon Mr Melbury of the womanly mien and manners of his daughter, which took him so much unawares that, though it did not make him absolutely forget the existence of her conductor-homeward, thrust Giles's image back into quite the obscure cellarage of his brain. Another was his interview with Mrs Sharman's agent that morning, at which the lady herself had been present for a few minutes. Melbury had purchased some standing timber from her a long time before, and now that, indeed, had come fulfilling it, he was left to pursue almost his own course. This was what the household were actually talking of during Giles's cogitation without, and Melbury's satisfaction with the clear atmosphere that had arisen between himself and the deity of the groves which enclosed his residence was the cause of a counter-balancing mistiness on the side towards Winterborne. So thoroughly did she trust me, said Melbury, that I might fell, top, lop, on my own judgment, and he stick a timber, whatever in her wood, and fix the price in it and settle the matter. But, name it all, I wouldn't do such a thing. However, it may be useful to have this good understanding with her. I wish she took more interest in the place, and stayed here all the year round. I am afraid it is not her regard for you, but her dislike of Hintock that makes her so easy about the trees, said Mrs. Melbury. When dinner was over, Grace took a candle and began to ramble, pleasurably, through the rooms of her old home, from which she had laterally become well-nigh an alien. Each nook and each object revived a memory, and simultaneously modified it. The chamber seemed lower than they had appeared on any previous occasion of a return. The surfaces of both walls and ceiling, standing in such relations to the eye that it could not avoid taking microscopic note of their irregularities and old fashion. Her own bedroom wore at once a look more familiar than when she had left it, and yet a face estranged. The world of little things therein gazed at her in helpless stationeriness, as though they had tried and been unable to make any progress without her presence. Over the place where her candle had been accustomed to stand, when she had used to read in bed till the midnight hour, there was still the brown spot of smoke. She did not know that her father had taken a special care to keep it from being cleaned off. Having concluded her perambulation of this now uselessly commodious edifice, Grace began to feel that she had come a long journey since the morning, and when her father had been up himself, as well as his wife, to see that her bedroom was comfortable and the fire burning, she prepared to retire for the night. No sooner, however, was she in bed, than her momentary sleepiness took itself off, and she wished she had stayed up longer. She amused herself by listening to the old familiar noises that she could hear still to be going on downstairs, and by looking towards the window as she lay. The blind had been drawn up, as she used to habit when a girl, and she could just discern the dim treetops against the sky on the neighbouring hill. Beneath this meeting line of light and shade nothing was visible save one solitary point of light, which blinked as the treetwigs waved to and fro before its beams. From its position it seemed to radiate from the window of a house on the hillside. The house had been empty when she was last at home, and she wondered who inhabited the place now. Her conjectures, however, were not intently carried on, and she was watching the light quite idly, when it gradually changed colour, and at length shone blue as a sapphire. Thus it remained several minutes, and then it passed through violet to red. Her curiosity was so widely awakened by the phenomenon that she sat up in bed, and stared steadily at the shine. An appearance of this sort, sufficient to excite attention anywhere, was no less than a marvel in Hintuck, as Grace had known the Hamlet. Almost every diurnal and nocturnal effect in that woodland place had hitherto been the direct result of the irregular terrestrial role which produced the season's changes. But here was something dissociated from these normal sequences, and foreign to local inhabitant knowledge. It was about this moment that Grace heard the household below preparing to retire, the most emphatic noise in the proceeding being that of her father bolting the doors. Then the stairs creaked, and her father and mother passed her chamber. The last to come was Grammar Oliver. Grace slid out of bed, ran across the room, and lifting the latch said, I am not a sleep-grammar, come in and talk to me. Before the old woman had entered, Grace was again under the bed's laws. Grammar sat down her candlestick and seated herself on the edge of Miss Melbury's coverlet. I want you to tell me what light that is, I see on the hillside, said Grace. Mrs. Oliver looked across. Oh, that, she said, is from the doctors. He's often doing things of that sort. Perhaps you don't know that with a doctor living here now, Mr. Fitzpiers by name. Grace admitted that she had not heard of him. Well then, Miss, he's come here to get up at practice. I know him very well, through going there to help him scrub sometimes, which your father said on my do if I wanted to in my spare time. Being a bachelor man, he's only a lad in the house. Oh, yes, I know him very well. Sometimes he'd talk to me as if I were his own mother. Indeed. Yes, Grammar, he said one day, when I asked him why he came here, where there's hardly anybody living. I'll tell you why I came here. I took a map, and I marked on it where Dr. Jones' practice ends, to the nought of the district, and where Mr. Taylor's ends on the south, and little Jimmy Greene's on the east, and somebody else's to the west. Then I took a pair of compasses, and I found the exact middle of the country that was left between these bounds. And that middle was Little Hintock. So here I am, but Lord there, poor young man. Why? He said, Grammar Oliver, I've been here three months, and oh, there are many good people in the Hintocks, and the villages around, and the scattered practices are often a very good one. I don't seem to get many patients, and there's no society at all, and I'm pretty near Melancholy Mad, he said, with a great yarn. I should be quite if I went off in my books, and my lab, laboratory, and what not. Grammar, I was made for higher things, and then he'd yarn and yarn again. Was he really made for higher things, do you think? I mean, is he clever? Well, no. How can he be clever? He may be able to join up a broken man or woman after a fashion, and put his finger on an ache if you tell him nearly where it is. But these young men, they should live to my time in life, and then they'd see how clever they were at five and twenty. And yet, he's a project, a real project, and says the oddest rossums. Ah, Grammar, he said, at another time. Let me tell you that everything is nothing. There's only me, and not me, in the whole world. And he told me that no man's hands could help what they did any more than the hands of a clock. Yes, he's a man of strange meditations, and his eyes seem to see as far as a North Star. He would soon go away, no doubt. I don't think so. Grace did not say why, and Grammar hesitated. At last she went on. Don't tell your father or mother, Miss, if I let you know a secret. Grace gave the required promise. Well, he talks of buying me, so we won't go away just yet. Buying you? How? Not my soul, my body, when I'm dead. One day when I was there cleaning, he said, Grammar, you have a large brain, a very large organ of a brain, he said. A woman's is usually four ounces less than a man's, but yours is man's size. Well then, he after he flattered me a bit like that, he said he'd give me ten pounds to have me as a nanny after my death. Well, no one, no chick, no child left, and nobody was any interested in me. I thought, fate, if I can be of any use to my fellow creatures after I'm gone, they are welcome to my services, and so I said I'd think it over, and would most likely agree and take the ten pounds. Now, this is a secret, Miss, between us two. The money would be very useful to me, and you see no harm in it." "'Of course there's no harm, but—oh, Grammar, how can you think to do it? I wish you hadn't told me.' "'Now, I wish I hadn't, if you don't like to know what, Miss, and put your need in mind. Lordy, I shall keep him waiting many a year, let bless ye.' I hope you will, I am sure." The girl, thereupon, fell into such deep reflection, that conversation languished, and Grammar Oliver, taking her candle, wished Miss Melbury good night. The latter's eyes rested on the distant glimmer, around which she allowed her reasoning fancy to play in vague eddies, that shaped the doings of the philosopher behind that light on the lines of intelligence just received. It was strange to her to come back from the world, to little hintock and find in one of its nooks, like a tropical plant in a hedgerow, a nucleus of advanced ideas and practices, which had nothing in common with the life around. Chemical experiments, anatomical projects, and metaphysical conceptions had found a strange home here. Thus she remained thinking, the imagined pursuits of the man behind the light intermingling with conjectual sketches of his personality, till her eyes fell together with their own heaviness. And she slept.