The Woodlanders
by Thomas Hardy
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

CHAPTER I.

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 way-
side 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 the high-way, 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 forlorn.

At this spot, on the lowering evening of a by-gone winter's day,
there stood a man who had entered upon the scene much in the
aforesaid manner. Alighting into the road from a stile 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 sombre 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 men's work that had been expended
in climbing that hill, the blistered soles 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 there loomed in the notch of the
hill and 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. Dollery'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
rein.

"I've been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this last
half-hour, Mrs. Dollery," he said. "But though I've been to Great
Hintock and Hintock House half a dozen times I am at 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. Dollery, "'tis such a little small place
that, as a town gentleman, you'd need have a candle and lantern to
find it if ye don't know where 'tis. Bedad! I wouldn't live there
if they'd pay me to. Now at Great Hintock you do see the world a
bit."

He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where they
were ever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail.

This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable
attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who
knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and
color of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were
distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood--though if all had
their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been
picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging here--
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 crupper, 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 Sherton Abbas--the market-town to which he journeyed--
as accurately as any surveyor could have learned 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 her gown for modesty's sake, and instead of a
bonnet a felt hat tied down with a handkerchief, to guard against
an 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. Snugly ensconced 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 new-comer spoke to the proprietress, they indulged in a
confidential chat about him as about other people, which the noise
of the van rendered inaudible to himself and Mrs. Dollery, sitting
forward.

"'Tis Barber Percombe--he that's got the waxen 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 'tis
not genteel!"

They listened to his conversation, but Mr. Percombe, 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 thenceforward.

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 hearth-stones festooned overhead
with hams and flitches. It was one of those 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 a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean 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 undiscerned
songsters 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. Dollery'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 be going to--not
because there's anybody for'n to cure there, but because 'tis the
middle of his district."

The 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 denizens of Little Hintock deemed window-curtains
unnecessary; and on this account Mr. Percombe made it his business
to stop opposite the casements of each cottage that he came to,
with a demeanor which showed that he was endeavoring to
conjecture, from the persons and things he observed within, the
whereabouts of somebody or other who resided here.

Only the smaller dwellings interested him; one or two houses,
whose size, antiquity, and rambling appurtenances signified that
notwithstanding their remoteness they must formerly have been, if
they were not still, inhabited by people of a certain social
standing, being neglected by him entirely. Smells of pomace, 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.

Half 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 him to draw up with a
terminative air and watch. The house was rather large for a
cottage, and the door, which opened immediately into the living-
room, stood ajar, 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.

CHAPTER II.

In the room 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 leather glove, much too large for her, on the other,
she was making spars, such as are used by thatchers, 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 definitively shown 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 the 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 cui
bono had led to the discontinuance of the custom, and the stools
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 this 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 labor, 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 haft 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 fulness of expression which is developed by
a life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude beat like waves
upon a countenance they seem to wear away its individuality; but
in the still water of privacy every tentacle of feeling and
sentiment shoots out in visible 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 firelight, 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 new-comer'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 spar-maker composed itself into a post-Raffaelite picture
of extremest quality, wherein the girl's hair alone, as the focus
of observation, was depicted with intensity and distinctness, and
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 on the sanded floor,
and exclaiming, "Oh, Mr. Percombe, how you frightened me!" quite
lost her color for a moment.

He replied, "You should shut your door--then you'd hear folk open
it."

"I can't," she said; "the chimney smokes so. Mr. Percombe, you
look as unnatural out of your shop as a canary in a thorn-hedge.
Surely you have not come out here on my account--for--"

"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 can NOT 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 up-stairs awake, and he don't know that I am doing
his work."

"Well, now tell me," said the man, more softly. "How much do you
get?"

"Eighteenpence 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 half the night, three bundles--that's a thousand and
a half."

"Two and threepence." 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
her 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
'tis a shade you can't match by dyeing. But you are not going to
refuse me now I've come all the way from Sherton o' purpose?"

"I say I won't sell it--to you or anybody."

"Now listen," and he drew up 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'll make the one
sovereign two, rather than go back empty-handed."

"No, no, no!" she cried, beginning to be much agitated. "You are
a-tempting me, Mr. Percombe. You go on like the Devil to Dr.
Faustus in the penny book. But I don't want your money, and 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 hearken. The lady that wants it wants it badly. And,
between you and me, you'd better let her have it. 'Twill 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 am not at liberty to tell you. And as she is going abroad soon
it makes no difference who she is at all."

"She wants it to go abroad wi'?"

Percombe assented by a nod. The girl regarded him reflectively.
"Barber Percombe," she said, "I know who 'tis. 'Tis 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. As she won't wear it till she goes off
abroad, she knows nobody will recognize the change. I'm
commissioned to get it for her, and then it is to be made up. I
shouldn't have vamped all these miles for any less important
employer. Now, mind--'tis as much as my business with her is
worth if it should be known that I've let out her name; but honor
between us two, 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 nettled
barber. "You see, Marty, as you are in the same parish, and in
one of her cottages, and your father is ill, and wouldn't like to
turn out, it would be as well to oblige her. I say that 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 are 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, or 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 it's her fancy it must be indulged if possible.
If you cut it off yourself, mind how you do it so as to keep all
the locks one way." He showed her how this was to be done.

"But I sha'nt," she replied, with laconic indifference. "I value
my looks too much to spoil 'em. She wants my hair to get another
lover with; though if stories are true she's broke the heart of
many a noble gentleman already."

"Lord, it's wonderful how you guess things, Marty," said the
barber. "I'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 him through me."

Percombe had retired as far as the door; he came back, planted his
cane on the coffin-stool, and looked her in the face. "Marty
South," he said, with deliberate emphasis, "YOU'VE GOT A LOVER
YOURSELF, and that's why you won't let it go!"

She reddened 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 wellnigh sodden
away by such cleansing. At the top she gently approached a
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 to-morrow 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 ye had talking to ye down-stairs?"

"A Sherton man called--nothing to trouble about," she said,
soothingly. "Father," she went on, "can Mrs. Charmond turn us out
of our house if she's minded to?"

"Turn us out? No. Nobody can turn us out till my poor soul is
turned out of my body. 'Tis life-hold, like Ambrose
Winterborne's. But when my life drops 'twill be hers--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
will do it--that tree will 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 hill-side, of which there is nothing to say at
present; the other shone from the window of Marty 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 ajar 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 neighbors, 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 wayfarer would have
perceived that here the cottager did not sleep as elsewhere.

Eleven, twelve, one o'clock struck; the heap of spars 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 jaundiced
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 spars she had last made in
a bundle resembling those that lay against the wall.

She wrapped round her a long red woollen cravat and opened the
door. The night in all its fulness met her flatly on the
threshold, like the very brink of an absolute void, or the
antemundane Ginnung-Gap believed in by her Teuton 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 over-crowded branches in the
neighboring wood which were rubbing each other into wounds, and
other vocalized sorrows of the trees, together with the screech of
owls, and the fluttering tumble of some awkward wood-pigeon ill-
balanced on its roosting-bough.

But the pupils of her young eyes soon expanded, and she could see
well enough for her purpose. Taking a bundle of spars under each
arm, and guided by the serrated line of tree-tops 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
about everywhere. Night, that strange personality, which within
walls brings ominous introspectiveness and self-distrust, but
under the open sky banishes such subjective anxieties as too
trivial for thought, inspired Marty South with a less perturbed
and brisker manner now. She laid the spars 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 copse-ware
merchant for whom Marty's father did work of this sort by the
piece. It formed one of the many rambling out-houses 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-
battle ships, with which venerable hulks, indeed, these vehicles
evidenced a constructed spirit curiously in harmony. One was
laden with sheep-cribs, another with hurdles, another with ash
poles, and the fourth, at the foot of which she had placed her
thatching-spars was half full of similar bundles.

She was pausing 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
hedge say, anxiously, "George!" In a moment the name was repeated,
with "Do come indoors! 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. Its
rays 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 South recognized 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.

"'Tis 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. 'Tis all right, George," said his wife; and she assured
him that such things always did appear so gloomy in the night-
time, if people allowed 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 or 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.

To 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 is 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 Winterborne."

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 it much."

Marty South appeared startled, and could not tear herself away.

Yes, the timber-merchant asserted, he knew that well enough.
Winterborne 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 timber-
merchant, with feeling. "There lies my trouble. I vowed 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 on my conscience ever since that time
till this scheme of making amends occurred to me through seeing
that Giles liked her."

"Wronged 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," said he; "for I feel I am
sacrificing her for my own sin; and I think of her, and often come
down here and look at this."

"Look at what?" asked his wife.

He took the candle from her hand, held it to the ground, and
removed a tile which lay in the garden-path. "'Tis the 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's 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. Charmond is wanting some refined
young lady, I hear, 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, true," said Melbury; "and I hope it will be for the best.
Yes, let me get 'em married up as soon as I can, so as to have it
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'll write soon, depend upon't. Come, 'tis 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
render the open hearts of those who possess them less dexterous
than formerly in shutting against the blast, they must suffer
"buffeting at will by rain and storm" no less than Little
Celandines.

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 him 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 mercilessly cutting off the long locks of her
hair, arranging and tying them with their points all one way, as
the barber had directed. Upon the pale scrubbed deal of the
coffin-stool table they stretched like waving and ropy weeds over
the washed gravel-bed of a clear stream.

She would 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 own ancestral goddess Sif the reflection in the pool after
the rape of her locks by Loke 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 alarum made of a candle and piece of thread, with a stone
attached.

But such a reminder was unnecessary to-night. Having tossed till
about five o'clock, Marty heard the sparrows walking down their
long holes in the thatch 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. Melbury'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 head-gear into sudden
prominence as a shadow. At this a step approached the door.

"Are folk astir here 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 flung 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 it dangled marked grotesque shapes upon
the shadier part of the walls.

He said that he had looked in 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 they 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 formed no
detached design at all, but were part of the pattern in 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 you tell anybody, will you, Mr. Winterborne?" she pleaded,
by way of answer. "Because I am afraid Mr. Melbury may refuse my
work if he knows it is mine."

"But how could you learn to do it? 'Tis a trade."

"Trade!" said she. "I'd be bound to learn it in two hours."

"Oh no, you wouldn't, Mrs. 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 are
too good for the thatching of houses--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 wi' it. Now I'll help put 'em up in
wagon."

Winterborne without speaking set down his lantern, lifted her as
she was about to stoop over the bundles, placed her behind him,
and began throwing up the bundles himself. "Rather than you
should do it I will," he said. "But the men will be here
directly. Why, Marty!--whatever has happened to your head? Lord,
it has shrunk to nothing--it looks an apple upon 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 now.

"Then why must you needs say that about apples and gate-posts?"

"Let me see."

"No, no!" She ran off into 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 wan circles 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 morning 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
bestirred themselves, rising at this time of the year at the 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 out-houses, rabbits that
had been eating the wintergreens in the gardens, and stoats that
had been sucking the blood of the rabbits, discerning that their
human neighbors were on the move, discreetly withdrew from
publicity, and were seen and heard no more that day.

The daylight revealed the 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 canonized 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 remoter and far grander memorials which
have to speak from the misty reaches of mediaevalism. 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 key-stoned
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, fagots, 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-backed
erection, now used for spar-making, sawing, crib-framing, and
copse-ware manufacture in general. Opposite were the wagon-sheds
where Marty had deposited her spars.

Here Winterborne had remained after the girl's 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 Melburys. As in most villages so secluded as
this, intermarriages were of Hapsburgian 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
copse-ware business, found that the weight of his labor came in
winter and spring. Winterborne was in the apple and cider 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 White-hart
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 outhouse 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 eaves as to lift from their
supports the shelves that were fixed there.

Besides the itinerant journey-workers there were also present John
Upjohn, engaged in the hollow-turnery trade, who lived hard by;
old Timothy Tangs and young Timothy Tangs, top and bottom sawyers,
at work in Mr. Melbury's pit outside; Farmer Bawtree, who kept the
cider-house, and Robert Creedle, an old man who worked for
Winterborne, and stood warming his hands; these latter being
enticed in by the ruddy blaze, though they had no particular
business there. None of them call for any remark except, perhaps,
Creedle. To have completely described him it would have been
necessary to write a military memoir, for he wore under his smock-
frock a cast-off soldier's jacket that had seen hot service, its
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 shipwreck, for his pocket-knife
had been given him by a weather-beaten sailor. But Creedle
carried about with him on his uneventful rounds these silent
testimonies of war, sport, and adventure, and thought nothing of
their associations or their stories.

Copse-work, as it was called, being an occupation which the
secondary intelligence of the hands and arms could carry on
without requiring 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 exhaustive 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 Creedle, "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 see her, 'you go to your church, and sit,
and kneel, as if your knee-jints were greased with very saint's
anointment, and tell off your Hear-us-good-Lords like a business
man counting money; and yet you can eat your victuals such a
figure as that!' Whether she's a reformed character by this time I
can't say; but I 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 Creedle threw grieved remembrance into physical
form by slowly resigning his head to obliquity and letting his
eyes water. "That man! 'Not if the angels of heaven come down,
Creedle,' 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 in vain as yours or mine! Well, now I must get
these spars home-along, and to-morrow, thank God, I must see about
using 'em."

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 come now
for fuel. She had two facial aspects--one, of a soft and flexible
kind, she used indoors when assisting about the parlor or up-
stairs; the other, with stiff lines and corners, when she was
bustling among the men in the spar-house or out-of-doors.

"Ah, Grammer Oliver," said John Upjohn, "it do do my heart good to
see a old woman like you so dapper and stirring, when I bear in
mind that after fifty one year counts as two did afore! But your
smoke didn't rise this morning till twenty minutes past seven by
my beater; and that's late, Grammer Oliver."

"If you was a full-sized man, John, people might take notice of
your scornful 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-gad to one of the workmen, from which dangled a
long black-pudding--"here's something for thy breakfast, and if
you want tea you must fetch it from in-doors."

"Mr. Melbury is late this morning," said the bottom-sawyer.

"Yes. 'Twas 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 maister's slept at all well to-night. He's anxious about
his daughter; and I know what that is, for I've cried bucketfuls
for my own."

When the old woman had gone Creedle said,

"He'll fret his 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 is taller out of pattens than her
mother was in 'em--'tis tempting Providence."

"It seems no time ago that she was a little playward girl," said
young Timothy Tangs.

"I can mind her mother," said the hollow-turner. "Always a teuny,
delicate piece; her touch upon your hand was as soft and cool as
wind. She was inoculated for the small-pox and had it beautifully
fine, just about the time that I was out of my apprenticeship--ay,
and a long apprenticeship 'twas. 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. Winterborne's father walked with her at 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 half-penny doll and put her over without
dirting her a speck. And if he keeps the daughter so long at
boarding-school, he'll make her as nesh as her mother was. But
here he comes."

Just before this moment Winterborne had seen Melbury crossing the
court from his door. He was carrying an open letter in his hand,
and came straight to Winterborne. 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 come or write than I get a letter from her--'Clifton:
Wednesday. My dear father,' says she, 'I'm coming home to-morrow'
(that's to-day), 'but I didn't think it worth while to write long
beforehand.' The little rascal, and didn't she! Now, Giles, as you
are going to Sherton market to-day with your apple-trees, why not
join me and Grace there, and we'll 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. Ever it happens that even
among the moodiest the tendency to be cheered is stronger than the
tendency to be cast down; and a soul's specific gravity stands
permanently less than that of the sea of troubles into which it is
thrown.

Winterborne, though not demonstrative, replied to this suggestion
with something like alacrity. There was not much doubt that
Marty's grounds for cutting off her hair were substantial enough,
if Ambrose'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 his 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 Winterborne, he now turned towards the door of the
spar-house, when his footsteps were heard by the men as aforesaid.

"Well, John, and Lot," he said, nodding as he entered. "A rimy
morning."

"'Tis, sir!" said Creedle, energetically; for, not having as yet
been able to summon force sufficient to go away and begin work, he
felt the necessity of throwing some into his speech. "I don't
care who the man is, 'tis the rimiest morning we've had this
fall."

"I heard you wondering why I've kept my daughter so long at
boarding-school," resumed Mr. Melbury, looking up from the letter
which he was reading anew by the fire, and turning to them with
the suddenness that was a trait in him. "Hey?" he asked, with
affected shrewdness. "But you did, you know. Well, now, though
it is my own business more than anybody else's, I'll tell ye.
When I was a boy, another boy--the pa'son'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 thought to myself there and then--'They may laugh
at me for my ignorance, but that was father's fault, and none o'
my making, 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 governess for a time. Let 'em laugh
now if they can: Mrs. Charmond herself is not better informed than
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, he stood by the fire, mechanically stirring the
embers with a spar-gad.

"You'll be, then, ready, Giles?" Melbury continued, awaking from a
reverie. "Well, what was the latest news at Shottsford yesterday,
Mr. Bawtree?"

"Well, Shottsford is Shottsford still--you can't victual your
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 of home.' It seems that our new neighbor,
this young Dr. 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."

"'Od 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 Sherton Abbas for the maid."

"I won't praise the doctor's wisdom till I hear what sort of
bargain he's made," said the top-sawyer.

"'Tis only an old woman's tale," said Bawtree. "But it seems that
he wanted certain books on some mysterious science or black-art,
and in order that the people hereabout should not know anything
about his dark readings, he ordered 'em direct from London, and
not from the Sherton book-seller. The parcel was delivered by
mistake at the pa'son's, and he wasn't at home; so his wife opened
it, and went into hysterics when she read 'em, thinking her
husband had turned heathen, and 'twould be the ruin of the
children. But when he came he said he knew no more about 'em than
she; and found they were this Mr. Fitzpier's property. So he
wrote 'Beware!' outside, and sent 'em on by the sexton."

"He must be a curious young man," mused the hollow-turner.

"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, "'tis 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 'em, ten to one they can cure ye as
nobody else can."

"True," said Bawtree, emphatically. "And for my part I shall take
my custom from old Jones and go to this one directly I've anything
the matter with me. That last medicine old Jones gave me had no
taste in it at all."

Mr. Melbury, as became a well-informed man, did not listen to
these recitals, being moreover 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 divers sprains and over-
exertions 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 origin of every one of these
cramps: that in his left shoulder had come of carrying a pollard,
unassisted, from Tutcombe 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 bole. On many a morrow after
wearying 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 rheumatisms,
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 Grammer Oliver to breakfast, he left the shed.
Reaching the kitchen, where the family breakfasted in winter to
save house-labor, 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 whitewashed 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've recollected that I promised to meet Mrs. Charmond's
steward in Round Wood at twelve o'clock, and yet I want to go for
Grace."

"Why not let Giles fetch her by himself? 'Twill bring 'em 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 into Sherton, and wait and see her arrive; and
perhaps she'll 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 him."

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 nurse to his child
Grace before her mother's death. After that melancholy event
little Grace had clung 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 was 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 with 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-merchant's restitutory
aims, quietly thought all this to be a kindly chance. Wishing
even more than her father to despatch his apple-tree business in
the market before Grace's arrival, he prepared to start at once.

Melbury was careful that the turnout should be seemly. The gig-
wheels, for instance, were not always washed during winter-time
before a journey, the muddy roads rendering that labor 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
hoofs 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 'tis 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 earth over us; but she, fresh
from a city--why, she'll notice everything!"

"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, 'tis as well to meet her views as nearly as
possible. Why, 'tis a year 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 affected 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
into 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 the 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 in-doors. Before the gig had passed out of sight,
Mr. Melbury reappeared and shouted after--

"Here, Giles, "he said, breathlessly following with some wraps,
"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. Charmond's agent, which prevented me. Don't forget."

He watched Winterborne 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! 'Tis
a pity to let such a girl throw herself away upon him--a thousand
pities!...And yet 'tis my duty for his father's sake."

CHAPTER V.

Winterborne sped on his way to Sherton Abbas without elation and
without discomposure. Had he regarded his inner self
spectacularly, as lovers are now daily more wont 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 pattens, 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 the pattens; 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.

"Why do you wear pattens, Marty? The turnpike is clean enough,
although the lanes are muddy."

"They save my boots."

"But twelve miles in pattens--'twill twist your feet off. Come,
get up and ride with me."

She hesitated, removed her pattens, 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, being not unheard of in that locality.

But nature's adornment was still hard by--in fact, within two feet
of him, 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 intrust to other hands.

Giles asked, with some hesitation, how her father was getting on.

He was better, she said; 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 for him 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 am afraid it may seem that my anxiety is about those
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 they will be Mrs. Charmond's?"

"They'll be hers."

"They are 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 right of another woman,"
she said, with playful malice, as she put on her pattens. "I
wonder what you are thinking of! Thank you for the lift in that
handsome gig. Good-by."

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 liny distinctness of
architectural drawings, as if the original dream and vision of the
conceiving master-mason, some mediaeval Vilars or other unknown to
fame, were for a few minutes flashed down through the centuries to
an unappreciative age. Giles saw their eloquent look on this day
of transparency, but could not construe it. He turned into the
inn-yard.

Marty, following the same track, marched promptly to the hair-
dresser's, Mr. Percombe's. 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 "Perruquier 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 twopences from the farm laborers
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. "I
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
market-place. 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
plain. Now here she was come, he knew not how, and his arranged
welcome stultified.

His face became gloomy at her necessity for stepping into the
road, and more still at the 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 the market-place.
Having had occasion to take off the new gloves she had bought to
come home in, she held out to him a hand graduating 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 Abbas 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 color 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
to-day, 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 by-stander, 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 recognized by Miss Melbury; but
abruptly checking herself, she glided behind a carrier's van,
saying, dryly, "No; I baint 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 presentment 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; 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 Prout's or
Vandyke brown.

There was nothing remarkable in her dress just now, beyond a
natural fitness and a style that was recent for 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 color 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
rein. She walked still faster.

But between these and herself there was a carriage, apparently a
brougham, 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 mortification of
being overtaken and picked up for pity's sake by the coming pair.
Accordingly, as the carriage drew abreast of her in climbing the
long ascent, she walked close to the wheels, the rays of the
nearest lamp penetrating her very pores. 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 interior of the vehicle.

Marty gladly assented, for she was weary, very weary, after
working all night and keeping afoot 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 poll (since she had kept away
her face), and thought that those stubbles were the result of her
own desire.

Marty South was not so 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 unfathomed mysteries,
beneath them there beat a heart capable of quick extempore 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.

"'Tis wonderful that she should ask ye," observed the magisterial
coachman, presently. "I have never known her do it 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
Tempe of the parishioners. But she could discern nothing of the
lady. She also looked for Miss Melbury and Winterborne. The nose
of their horse sometimes came quite near 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.

"Mis'ess yawning."

"Why should she yawn?"

"Oh, because she's 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 fay with she any more than with we!"

Marty now alighted; the lamp again shone upon her, and as the
carriage rolled on, 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.

CHAPTER VI.

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 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 Brownley's farm-buildings look strange to you, now they
have been moved bodily from the hollow where the old ones 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 bitter-sweets; they couldn't grind them
all" (nodding towards an orchard where some heaps of apples had
been left lying ever since the ingathering).

She said "Yes," but looking at another orchard.

"Why, you are looking at John-apple-trees! You know bitter-sweets--
you 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
interest 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 at present was merely this, that
where he was seeing John-apples and farm-buildings she was
beholding a far remoter scene--a scene no less innocent and
simple, indeed, but much contrasting--a broad lawn in the
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 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 a
deferential Sir or Madam. Beside this visioned scene the homely
farmsteads 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.

"'Twas very odd what we said to each other years ago; I 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--"

"It was child's tattle."

"H'm!" said Giles, suddenly.

"I mean we were young," said she, more considerately. 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 am 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 round your waist and there you let it stay till your
father, sitting in front suddenly stopped telling his story to
Farmer Bollen, 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 'em had seen, and
laughed at us. Yet your father, to our amazement, instead of
being angry, was mild as milk, and seemed quite pleased. Have you
forgot 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 did the time
seem 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 brougham.

"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 visited last summer?"

"With all my heart."

She then 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. When she had done
she said, gayly, "Now do you tell me in return what has happened
in Hintock since I have been away."

"Anything to keep the conversation away from her and 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. Charmond's.

Grace watched the vehicle and its easy roll, and seemed to feel
more nearly akin to it than to the one she was in.

"Pooh! We can polish off the mileage as well as they, come to
that," said Winterborne, reading her mind; and rising to emulation
at what it bespoke, he whipped on the horse. This it was which
had brought the nose of Mr. Melbury's old gray close to the back
of Mrs. Charmond's much-eclipsing vehicle.

"There's Marty South Sitting up with the coachman," said he,
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 is 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-merchant's. Pencils of dancing light streamed out of the
windows sufficiently to show the white laurestinus 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 parlor were reflected from the glass of the pictures
and bookcase, 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 whole kept going by means of a cord conveyed
over pulleys along the ceiling to a large stone suspended in a
corner of the room. Old Grammer Oliver came and wound it up with
a rattle like that of a mill.

In the parlor 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 step-
mother came out to welcome her.

The character 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 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 in-doors, quite forgot the presence of Giles without, as did
also Grace herself. He said nothing, but took the gig round to
the yard and called out from the spar-house the man who
particularly attended to these matters when there was no
conversation to draw him off among the copse-workers inside.
Winterborne then returned to the door with the intention of
entering the house.

The family had gone into the parlor, 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 beside those of the two elders; shining
also through the loose hair about her temples as sunlight through
a brake. Her father was surveying her in a dazed conjecture, so
much had she developed and progressed in manner and stature since
he last had set eyes on her.

Observing these things, Winterborne remained dubious by the door,
mechanically tracing with his fingers certain time-worn letters
carved in the jambs--initials of by-gone 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 him, and it was enough for to-day that
he had brought her home. Still, he was a little surprised that
her father's eagerness to send him 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 thatched 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 mean time, 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 obscurest cellarage of his brain. Another was his interview
with Mrs. Charmond'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 the date
had come for felling 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
counterbalancing mistiness on the side towards Winterborne.

"So thoroughly does she trust me," said Melbury, "that I might
fell, top, or lop, on my own judgment, any stick o' timber
whatever in her wood, and fix the price o't, 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 'tis 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
latterly become wellnigh an alien. Each nook and each object
revived a memory, and simultaneously modified it. The chambers
seemed lower than they had appeared on any previous occasion of
her return, the surfaces of both walls and ceilings 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 stationariness, 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 especial 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 room 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 to be still going on down-stairs, and by looking towards the
window as she lay. The blind had been drawn up, as she used to
have it when a girl, and she could just discern the dim tree-tops
against the sky on the neighboring hill. Beneath this meeting-
line of light and shade nothing was visible save one solitary
point of light, which blinked as the tree-twigs waved to and fro
before its beams. From its position it seemed to radiate from the
window of a house on the hill-side. 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
color, and at length shone blue as 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 Hintock, as Grace had known the hamlet. Almost
every diurnal and nocturnal effect in that woodland place had
hitherto been the direct result of the regular terrestrial roll
which produced the season's changes; but here was something
dissociated from these normal sequences, and foreign to local
habit and 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 Grammer Oliver.

Grace slid out of bed, ran across the room, and lifting the latch,
said, "I am not asleep, Grammer. Come in and talk to me."

Before the old woman had entered, Grace was again under the
bedclothes. Grammer set 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 hill-side,"
said Grace.

Mrs. Oliver looked across. "Oh, that," she said, "is from the
doctor's. He's often doing things of that sort. Perhaps you
don't know that we've 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 a practice. I know
him very well, through going there to help 'em scrub sometimes,
which your father said I might do, if I wanted to, in my spare
time. Being a bachelor-man, he've only a lad in the house. Oh
yes, I know him very well. Sometimes he'll talk to me as if I
were his own mother."

"Indeed."

"Yes. 'Grammer,' 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's
practice ends to the north of this district, and where Mr.
Taylor's ends on the south, and little Jimmy Green's on the east,
and somebody else's to the west. Then I took a pair of compasses,
and 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, 'Grammer Oliver, I've been here three months, and
although there are a good many people in the Hintocks and the
villages round, and a scattered practice is 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 yawn.
'I should be quite if it were not for my books, and my lab--
laboratory, and what not. Grammer, I was made for higher things.'
And then he'd yawn and yawn 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 jine up a
broken man or woman after a fashion, and put his finger upon an
ache if you tell him nearly where 'tis; but these young men--they
should live to my time of life, and then they'd see how clever
they were at five-and-twenty! And yet he's a projick, a real
projick, and says the oddest of rozums. 'Ah, Grammer,' 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 the north star."

"He will soon go away, no doubt."

"I don't think so." Grace did not say "Why?" and Grammer
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 he 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, 'Grammer, you've a large brain--a very large
organ of brain,' he said. 'A woman's is usually four ounces less
than a man's; but yours is man's size.' Well, then--hee, hee!--
after he'd flattered me a bit like that, he said he'd give me ten
pounds to have me as a natomy after my death. Well, knowing I'd
no chick nor chiel left, and nobody with any interest in me, I
thought, faith, if I can be of any use to my fellow-creatures
after I'm gone they are welcome to my services; 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 I see no harm in it."

"Of course there's no harm. But oh, Grammer, how can you think to
do it? I wish you hadn't told me."

"I wish I hadn't--if you don't like to know it, miss. But you
needn't mind. Lord--hee, hee!--I shall keep him waiting many a
year yet, bless ye!"

"I hope you will, I am sure."

The girl thereupon fell into such deep reflection that
conversation languished, and Grammer 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 hedge-
row, 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 conjectural sketches of his
personality, till her eyes fell together with their own heaviness,
and she slept.

CHAPTER VII.

Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer
Oliver's skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne, brought
Grace Melbury to the morning of the next day. It was fine. A
north wind was blowing--that not unacceptable compromise between
the atmospheric cutlery of the eastern blast and the spongy gales
of the west quarter. She looked from her window in the direction
of the light of the previous evening, and could just discern
through the trees the shape of the surgeon's house. Somehow, in
the broad, practical daylight, that unknown and lonely gentleman
seemed to be shorn of much of the interest which had invested his
personality and pursuits in the hours of darkness, and as Grace's
dressing proceeded he faded from her mind.

Meanwhile, Winterborne, though half assured of her father's favor,
was rendered a little restless by Miss Melbury's behavior.
Despite his dry self-control, he could not help looking
continually from his own door towards the timber-merchant's, in
the probability of somebody's emergence therefrom. His attention
was at length justified by the appearance of two figures, that of
Mr. Melbury himself, and Grace beside him. They stepped out in a
direction towards the densest quarter of the wood, and Winterborne
walked contemplatively behind them, till all three were soon under
the trees.

Although the time of bare boughs had now set in, there were
sheltered hollows amid the Hintock plantations and copses in which
a more tardy leave-taking than on windy summits was the rule with
the foliage. This caused here and there an apparent mixture of
the seasons; so that in some of the dells that they passed by
holly-berries in full red were found growing beside oak and hazel
whose leaves were as yet not far removed from green, and brambles
whose verdure was rich and deep as in the month of August. To
Grace these well-known peculiarities were as an old painting
restored.

Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious
which the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter
months. Angles were taking the place of curves, and reticulations
of surfaces--a change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate
to the primitive on Nature's canvas, and comparable to a
retrogressive step from the art of an advanced school of painting
to that of the Pacific Islander.

Winterborne followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as
they threaded their way through these sylvan phenomena. Mr.
Melbury's long legs, and gaiters drawn in to the bone at the
ankles, his slight stoop, his habit of getting lost in thought and
arousing himself with an exclamation of "Hah!" accompanied with an
upward jerk of the head, composed a personage recognizable by his
neighbors as far as he could be seen. It seemed as if the
squirrels and birds knew him. One of the former would
occasionally run from the path to hide behind the arm of some
tree, which the little animal carefully edged round pari passu
with Melbury and his daughters movement onward, assuming a mock
manner, as though he were saying, "Ho, ho; you are only a timber-
merchant, and carry no gun!"

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through
interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading
roots, whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green
gloves; elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks, in which
stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days, and ran down
their stems in green cascades. On older trees still than these,
huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the
Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious
as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf
was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted;
the lichen eat the vigor of the stalk, and the ivy slowly
strangled to death the promising sapling.

They dived amid beeches under which nothing grew, the younger
boughs still retaining their hectic leaves, that rustled in the
breeze with a sound almost metallic, like the sheet-iron foliage
of the fabled Jarnvid wood. Some flecks of white in Grace's
drapery had enabled Giles to keep her and her father in view till
this time; but now he lost sight of them, and was obliged to
follow by ear--no difficult matter, for on the line of their
course every wood-pigeon rose from its perch with a continued
clash, dashing its wings against the branches with wellnigh force
enough to break every quill. By taking the track of this noise he
soon came to a stile.

Was it worth while to go farther? He examined the doughy soil at
the foot of the stile, and saw among the large sole-and-heel
tracks an impression of a slighter kind from a boot that was
obviously not local, for Winterborne knew all the cobblers'
patterns in that district, because they were very few to know.
The mud-picture was enough to make him swing himself over and
proceed.

The character of the woodland now changed. The bases of the
smaller trees were nibbled bare by rabbits, and at divers points
heaps of fresh-made chips, and the newly-cut stool of a tree,
stared white through the undergrowth. There had been a large fall
of timber this year, which explained the meaning of some sounds
that soon reached him.

A voice was shouting intermittently in a sort of human bark, which
reminded Giles that there was a sale of trees and fagots that very
day. Melbury would naturally be present. Thereupon Winterborne
remembered that he himself wanted a few fagots, and entered upon
the scene.

A large group of buyers stood round the auctioneer, or followed
him when, between his pauses, he wandered on from one lot of
plantation produce to another, like some philosopher of the
Peripatetic school delivering his lectures in the shady groves of
the Lyceum. His companions were timber-dealers, yeomen, farmers,
villagers, and others; mostly woodland men, who on that account
could afford to be curious in their walking-sticks, which
consequently exhibited various monstrosities of vegetation, the
chief being cork-screw shapes in black and white thorn, brought to
that pattern by the slow torture of an encircling woodbine during
their growth, as the Chinese have been said to mould human beings
into grotesque toys by continued compression in infancy. Two
women, wearing men's jackets on their gowns, conducted in the rear
of the halting procession a pony-cart containing a tapped barrel
of beer, from which they drew and replenished horns that were
handed round, with bread-and-cheese from a basket.

The auctioneer adjusted himself to circumstances by using his
walking-stick as a hammer, and knocked down the lot on any
convenient object that took his fancy, such as the crown of a
little boy's head, or the shoulders of a by-stander who had no
business there except to taste the brew; a proceeding which would
have been deemed humorous but for the air of stern rigidity which
that auctioneer's face preserved, tending to show that the
eccentricity was a result of that absence of mind which is
engendered by the press of affairs, and no freak of fancy at all.

Mr. Melbury stood slightly apart from the rest of the
Peripatetics, and Grace beside him, clinging closely to his arm,
her modern attire looking almost odd where everything else was
old-fashioned, and throwing over the familiar garniture of the
trees a homeliness that seemed to demand improvement by the
addition of a few contemporary novelties also. Grace seemed to
regard the selling with the interest which attaches to memories
revived after an interval of obliviousness.

Winterborne went and stood close to them; the timber-merchant
spoke, and continued his buying; Grace merely smiled. To justify
his presence there Winterborne began bidding for timber and fagots
that he did not want, pursuing the occupation in an abstracted
mood, in which the auctioneer's voice seemed to become one of the
natural sounds of the woodland. A few flakes of snow descended,
at the sight of which a robin, alarmed at these signs of imminent
winter, and seeing that no offence was meant by the human
invasion, came and perched on the tip of the fagots that were
being sold, and looked into the auctioneer's face, while waiting
for some chance crumb from the bread-basket. Standing a little
behind Grace, Winterborne observed how one flake would sail
downward and settle on a curl of her hair, and how another would
choose her shoulder, and another the edge of her bonnet, which
took up so much of his attention that his biddings proceeded
incoherently; and when the auctioneer said, every now and then,
with a nod towards him, "Yours, Mr. Winterborne," he had no idea
whether he had bought fagots, poles, or logwood.

He regretted, with some causticity of humor, that her father
should show such inequalities of temperament as to keep Grace
tightly on his arm to-day, when he had quite lately seemed anxious
to recognize their betrothal as a fact. And thus musing, and
joining in no conversation with other buyers except when directly
addressed, he followed the assemblage hither and thither till the
end of the auction, when Giles for the first time realized what
his purchases had been. Hundreds of fagots, and divers lots of
timber, had been set down to him, when all he had required had
been a few bundles of spray for his odd man Robert Creedle's use
in baking and lighting fires.

Business being over, he turned to speak to the timber merchant.
But Melbury's manner was short and distant; and Grace, too, looked
vexed and reproachful. Winterborne then discovered that he had
been unwittingly bidding against her father, and picking up his
favorite lots in spite of him. With a very few words they left
the spot and pursued their way homeward.

Giles was extremely sorry at what he had done, and remained
standing under the trees, all the other men having strayed
silently away. He saw Melbury and his daughter pass down a glade
without looking back. While they moved slowly through it a lady
appeared on horseback in the middle distance, the line of her
progress converging upon that of Melbury's. They met, Melbury
took off his hat, and she reined in her horse. A conversation was
evidently in progress between Grace and her father and this
equestrian, in whom he was almost sure that he recognized Mrs.
Charmond, less by her outline than by the livery of the groom who
had halted some yards off.

The interlocutors did not part till after a prolonged pause,
during which much seemed to be said. When Melbury and Grace
resumed their walk it was with something of a lighter tread than
before.

Winterborne then pursued his own course homeward. He was
unwilling to let coldness grow up between himself and the Melburys
for any trivial reason, and in the evening he went to their house.
On drawing near the gate his attention was attracted by the sight
of one of the bedrooms blinking into a state of illumination. In
it stood Grace lighting several candles, her right hand elevating
the taper, her left hand on her bosom, her face thoughtfully fixed
on each wick as it kindled, as if she saw in every flame's growth
the rise of a life to maturity. He wondered what such unusual
brilliancy could mean to-night. On getting in-doors he found her
father and step-mother in a state of suppressed excitement, which
at first he could not comprehend.

"I am sorry about my biddings to-day," said Giles. "I don't know
what I was doing. I have come to say that any of the lots you may
require are yours."

"Oh, never mind--never mind," replied the timber-merchant, with a
slight wave of his hand, "I have so much else to think of that I
nearly had forgot it. Just now, too, there are matters of a
different kind from trade to attend to, so don't let it concern
ye."

As the timber-merchant spoke, as it were, down to him from a
higher moral plane than his own, Giles turned to Mrs. Melbury.

"Grace is going to the House to-morrow," she said, quietly. "She
is looking out her things now. I dare say she is wanting me this
minute to assist her." Thereupon Mrs. Melbury left the room.

Nothing is more remarkable than the independent personality of the
tongue now and then. Mr. Melbury knew that his words had been a
sort of boast. He decried boasting, particularly to Giles; yet
whenever the subject was Grace, his judgment resigned the ministry
of speech in spite of him.

Winterborne felt surprise, pleasure, and also a little
apprehension at the news. He repeated Mrs. Melbury's words.

"Yes," said paternal pride, not sorry to have dragged out of him
what he could not in any circumstances have kept in. "Coming home
from the woods this afternoon we met Mrs. Charmond out for a ride.
She spoke to me on a little matter of business, and then got
acquainted with Grace. 'Twas wonderful how she took to Grace in a
few minutes; that freemasonry of education made 'em close at once.
Naturally enough she was amazed that such an article--ha, ha!--
could come out of my house. At last it led on to Mis'ess Grace
being asked to the House. So she's busy hunting up her frills and
furbelows to go in."  As Giles remained in thought without
responding, Melbury continued: "But I'll call her down-stairs."

"No, no; don't do that, since she's busy," said Winterborne.

Melbury, feeling from the young man's manner that his own talk had
been too much at Giles and too little to him, repented at once.
His face changed, and he said, in lower tones, with an effort,
"She's yours, Giles, as far as I am concerned."

"Thanks--my best thanks....But I think, since it is all right
between us about the biddings, that I'll not interrupt her now.
I'll step homeward, and call another time."

On leaving the house he looked up at the bedroom again. Grace,
surrounded by a sufficient number of candles to answer all
purposes of self-criticism, was standing before a cheval-glass
that her father had lately bought expressly for her use; she was
bonneted, cloaked, and gloved, and glanced over her shoulder into
the mirror, estimating her aspect. Her face was lit with the
natural elation of a young girl hoping to inaugurate on the morrow
an intimate acquaintance with a new, interesting, and powerful
friend.

CHAPTER VIII.

The inspiriting appointment which had led Grace Melbury to indulge
in a six-candle illumination for the arrangement of her attire,
carried her over the ground the next morning with a springy tread.
Her sense of being properly appreciated on her own native soil
seemed to brighten the atmosphere and herbage around her, as the
glowworm's lamp irradiates the grass. Thus she moved along, a
vessel of emotion going to empty itself on she knew not what.

Twenty minutes' walking through copses, over a stile, and along an
upland lawn brought her to the verge of a deep glen, at the bottom
of which Hintock House appeared immediately beneath her eye. To
describe it as standing in a hollow would not express the
situation of the manor-house; it stood in a hole, notwithstanding
that the hole was full of beauty. From the spot which Grace had
reached a stone could easily have been thrown over or into, the
birds'-nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted
by a battlemented parapet; but the gray lead roofs were quite
visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights,
together with incised letterings and shoe-patterns cut by idlers
thereon.

The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation
of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich
snuff-colored freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the
walls, where not overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated
with lichen of every shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its
nearness to the ground, till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.

Above the house to the back was a dense plantation, the roots of
whose trees were above the level of the chimneys. The
corresponding high ground on which Grace stood was richly grassed,
with only an old tree here and there. A few sheep lay about,
which, as they ruminated, looked quietly into the bedroom windows.
The situation of the house, prejudicial to humanity, was a
stimulus to vegetation, on which account an endless shearing of
the heavy-armed ivy was necessary, and a continual lopping of
trees and shrubs. It was an edifice built in times when human
constitutions were damp-proof, when shelter from the boisterous
was all that men thought of in choosing a dwelling-place, the
insidious being beneath their notice; and its hollow site was an
ocular reminder, by its unfitness for modern lives, of the
fragility to which these have declined. The highest architectural
cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and
salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make
it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature's own home; a spot to
inspire the painter and poet of still life--if they did not suffer
too much from the relaxing atmosphere--and to draw groans from the
gregariously disposed. Grace descended the green escarpment by a
zigzag path into the drive, which swept round beneath the slope.
The exterior of the house had been familiar to her from her
childhood, but she had never been inside, and the approach to
knowing an old thing in a new way was a lively experience. It was
with a little flutter that she was shown in; but she recollected
that Mrs. Charmond would probably be alone. Up to a few days
before this time that lady had been accompanied in her comings,
stayings, and goings by a relative believed to be her aunt;
latterly, however, these two ladies had separated, owing, it was
supposed, to a quarrel, and Mrs. Charmond had been left desolate.
Being presumably a woman who did not care for solitude, this
deprivation might possibly account for her sudden interest in
Grace.

Mrs. Charmond was at the end of a gallery opening from the hall
when Miss Melbury was announced, and saw her through the glass
doors between them. She came forward with a smile on her face,
and told the young girl it was good of her to come.

"Ah! you have noticed those," she said, seeing that Grace's eyes
were attracted by some curious objects against the walls. "They
are man-traps. My husband was a connoisseur in man-traps and
spring-guns and such articles, collecting them from all his
neighbors. He knew the histories of all these--which gin had
broken a man's leg, which gun had killed a man. That one, I
remember his saying, had been set by a game-keeper in the track of
a notorious poacher; but the keeper, forgetting what he had done,
went that way himself, received the charge in the lower part of
his body, and died of the wound. I don't like them here, but I've
never yet given directions for them to be taken away." She added,
playfully, "Man-traps are of rather ominous significance where a
person of our sex lives, are they not?"

Grace was bound to smile; but that side of womanliness was one
which her inexperience had no great zest in contemplating.

"They are interesting, no doubt, as relics of a barbarous time
happily past," she said, looking thoughtfully at the varied
designs of these instruments of torture--some with semi-circular
jaws, some with rectangular; most of them with long, sharp teeth,
but a few with none, so that their jaws looked like the blank gums
of old age.

"Well, we must not take them too seriously," said Mrs. Charmond,
with an indolent turn of her head, and they moved on inward. When
she had shown her visitor different articles in cabinets that she
deemed likely to interest her, some tapestries, wood-carvings,
ivories, miniatures, and so on--always with a mien of listlessness
which might either have been constitutional, or partly owing to
the situation of the place--they sat down to an early cup of tea.

"Will you pour it out, please? Do," she said, leaning back in her
chair, and placing her hand above her forehead, while her almond
eyes--those long eyes so common to the angelic legions of early
Italian art--became longer, and her voice more languishing. She
showed that oblique-mannered softness which is perhaps most
frequent in women of darker complexion and more lymphatic
temperament than Mrs. Charmond's was; who lingeringly smile their
meanings to men rather than speak them, who inveigle rather than
prompt, and take advantage of currents rather than steer.

"I am the most inactive woman when I am here," she said. "I think
sometimes I was born to live and do nothing, nothing, nothing but
float about, as we fancy we do sometimes in dreams. But that
cannot be really my destiny, and I must struggle against such
fancies."

"I am so sorry you do not enjoy exertion--it is quite sad! I wish
I could tend you and make you very happy."

There was something so sympathetic, so appreciative, in the sound
of Grace's voice, that it impelled people to play havoc with their
customary reservations in talking to her. "It is tender and kind
of you to feel that," said Mrs. Charmond. "Perhaps I have given
you the notion that my languor is more than it really is. But
this place oppresses me, and I have a plan of going abroad a good
deal. I used to go with a relative, but that arrangement has
dropped through." Regarding Grace with a final glance of
criticism, she seemed to make up her mind to consider the young
girl satisfactory, and continued: "Now I am often impelled to
record my impressions of times and places. I have often thought
of writing a 'New Sentimental Journey.'  But I cannot find energy
enough to do it alone. When I am at different places in the south
of Europe I feel a crowd of ideas and fancies thronging upon me
continually, but to unfold writing-materials, take up a cold steel
pen, and put these impressions down systematically on cold, smooth
paper--that I cannot do. So I have thought that if I always could
have somebody at my elbow with whom I am in sympathy, I might
dictate any ideas that come into my head. And directly I had made
your acquaintance the other day it struck me that you would suit
me so well. Would you like to undertake it? You might read to
me, too, if desirable. Will you think it over, and ask your
parents if they are willing?"

"Oh yes," said Grace. "I am almost sure they would be very glad."

"You are so accomplished, I hear; I should be quite honored by
such intellectual company."

Grace, modestly blushing, deprecated any such idea.

"Do you keep up your lucubrations at Little Hintock?"

"Oh no. Lucubrations are not unknown at Little Hintock; but they
are not carried on by me."

"What--another student in that retreat?"

"There is a surgeon lately come, and I have heard that he reads a
great deal--I see his light sometimes through the trees late at
night."

"Oh yes--a doctor--I believe I was told of him. It is a strange
place for him to settle in."

"It is a convenient centre for a practice, they say. But he does
not confine his studies to medicine, it seems. He investigates
theology and metaphysics and all sorts of subjects."

"What is his name?"

"Fitzpiers. He represents a very old family, I believe, the
Fitzpierses of Buckbury-Fitzpiers--not a great many miles from
here."

"I am not sufficiently local to know the history of the family. I
was never in the county till my husband brought me here." Mrs.
Charmond did not care to pursue this line of investigation.
Whatever mysterious merit might attach to family antiquity, it was
one which, though she herself could claim it, her adaptable,
wandering weltburgerliche nature had grown tired of caring about--
a peculiarity that made her a contrast to her neighbors. "It is
of rather more importance to know what the man is himself than
what his family is," she said, "if he is going to practise upon us
as a surgeon. Have you seen him?"

Grace had not. "I think he is not a very old man," she added.

"Has he a wife?"

"I am not aware that he has."

"Well, I hope he will be useful here. I must get to know him when
I come back. It will be very convenient to have a medical man--if
he is clever--in one's own parish. I get dreadfully nervous
sometimes, living in such an outlandish place; and Sherton is so
far to send to. No doubt you feel Hintock to be a great change
after watering-place life."

"I do. But it is home. It has its advantages and its
disadvantages." Grace was thinking less of the solitude than of
the attendant circumstances.

They chatted on for some time, Grace being set quite at her ease
by her entertainer. Mrs. Charmond was far too well-practised a
woman not to know that to show a marked patronage to a sensitive
young girl who would probably be very quick to discern it, was to
demolish her dignity rather than to establish it in that young
girl's eyes. So, being violently possessed with her idea of
making use of this gentle acquaintance, ready and waiting at her
own door, she took great pains to win her confidence at starting.

Just before Grace's departure the two chanced to pause before a
mirror which reflected their faces in immediate juxtaposition, so
as to bring into prominence their resemblances and their
contrasts. Both looked attractive as glassed back by the faithful
reflector; but Grace's countenance had the effect of making Mrs.
Charmond appear more than her full age. There are complexions
which set off each other to great advantage, and there are those
which antagonize, the one killing or damaging its neighbor
unmercifully. This was unhappily the case here. Mrs. Charmond
fell into a meditation, and replied abstractedly to a cursory
remark of her companion's. However, she parted from her young
friend in the kindliest tones, promising to send and let her know
as soon as her mind was made up on the arrangement she had
suggested.

When Grace had ascended nearly to the top of the adjoining slope
she looked back, and saw that Mrs. Charmond still stood at the
door, meditatively regarding her.

Often during the previous night, after his call on the Melburys,
Winterborne's thoughts ran upon Grace's announced visit to Hintock
House. Why could he not have proposed to walk with her part of
the way? Something told him that she might not, on such an
occasion, care for his company.

He was still more of that opinion when, standing in his garden
next day, he saw her go past on the journey with such a pretty
pride in the event. He wondered if her father's ambition, which
had purchased for her the means of intellectual light and culture
far beyond those of any other native of the village, would conduce
to the flight of her future interests above and away from the
local life which was once to her the movement of the world.

Nevertheless, he had her father's permission to win her if he
could; and to this end it became desirable to bring matters soon
to a crisis, if he ever hoped to do so. If she should think
herself too good for him, he could let her go and make the best of
his loss; but until he had really tested her he could not say that
she despised his suit. The question was how to quicken events
towards an issue.

He thought and thought, and at last decided that as good a way as
any would be to give a Christmas party, and ask Grace and her
parents to come as chief guests.

These ruminations were occupying him when there became audible a
slight knocking at his front door. He descended the path and
looked out, and beheld Marty South, dressed for out-door work.

"Why didn't you come, Mr. Winterborne?" she said. "I've been
waiting there hours and hours, and at last I thought I must try to
find you."

"Bless my soul, I'd quite forgot," said Giles.

What he had forgotten was that there was a thousand young fir-
trees to be planted in a neighboring spot which had been cleared
by the wood-cutters, and that he had arranged to plant them with
his own hands. He had a marvellous power of making trees grow.
Although he would seem to shovel in the earth quite carelessly,
there was a sort of sympathy between himself and the fir, oak, or
beech that he was operating on, so that the roots took hold of the
soil in a few days. When, on the other hand, any of the
journeymen planted, although they seemed to go through an
identically similar process, one quarter of the trees would die
away during the ensuing August.

Hence Winterborne found delight in the work even when, as at
present, he contracted to do it on portions of the woodland in
which he had no personal interest. Marty, who turned her hand to
anything, was usually the one who performed the part of keeping
the trees in a perpendicular position while he threw in the mould.

He accompanied her towards the spot, being stimulated yet further
to proceed with the work by the knowledge that the ground was
close to the way-side along which Grace must pass on her return
from Hintock House.

"You've a cold in the head, Marty," he said, as they walked.
"That comes of cutting off your hair."

"I suppose it do. Yes; I've three headaches going on in my head
at the same time."

"Three headaches!"

"Yes, a rheumatic headache in my poll, a sick headache over my
eyes, and a misery headache in the middle of my brain. However, I
came out, for I thought you might be waiting and grumbling like
anything if I was not there."

The holes were already dug, and they set to work. Winterborne's
fingers were endowed with a gentle conjuror's touch in spreading
the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress,
under which the delicate fibres all laid themselves out in their
proper directions for growth. He put most of these roots towards
the south-west; for, he said, in forty years' time, when some
great gale is blowing from that quarter, the trees will require
the strongest holdfast on that side to stand against it and not
fall.

"How they sigh directly we put 'em upright, though while they are
lying down they don't sigh at all," said Marty.

"Do they?" said Giles. "I've never noticed it."

She erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her
finger; the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not
to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled--
probably long after the two planters should be felled themselves.

"It seems to me," the girl continued, "as if they sigh because
they are very sorry to begin life in earnest--just as we be."

"Just as we be?" He looked critically at her. "You ought not to
feel like that, Marty."

Her only reply was turning to take up the next tree; and they
planted on through a great part of the day, almost without another
word. Winterborne's mind ran on his contemplated evening-party,
his abstraction being such that he hardly was conscious of Marty's
presence beside him. From the nature of their employment, in
which he handled the spade and she merely held the tree, it
followed that he got good exercise and she got none. But she was
an heroic girl, and though her out-stretched hand was chill as a
stone, and her cheeks blue, and her cold worse than ever, she
would not complain while he was disposed to continue work. But
when he paused she said, "Mr. Winterborne, can I run down the lane
and back to warm my feet?"

"Why, yes, of course," he said, awakening anew to her existence.
"Though I was just thinking what a mild day it is for the season.
Now I warrant that cold of yours is twice as bad as it was. You
had no business to chop that hair off, Marty; it serves you almost
right. Look here, cut off home at once."

"A run down the lane will be quite enough."

"No, it won't. You ought not to have come out to-day at all."

"But I should like to finish the--"

"Marty, I tell you to go home," said he, peremptorily. "I can
manage to keep the rest of them upright with a stick or
something."

She went away without saying any more. When she had gone down the
orchard a little distance she looked back. Giles suddenly went
after her.

"Marty, it was for your good that I was rough, you know. But warm
yourself in your own way, I don't care."

When she had run off he fancied he discerned a woman's dress
through the holly-bushes which divided the coppice from the road.
It was Grace at last, on her way back from the interview with Mrs.
Charmond. He threw down the tree he was planting, and was about
to break through the belt of holly when he suddenly became aware
of the presence of another man, who was looking over the hedge on
the opposite side of the way upon the figure of the unconscious
Grace. He appeared as a handsome and gentlemanly personage of six
or eight and twenty, and was quizzing her through an eye-glass.
Seeing that Winterborne was noticing him, he let his glass drop
with a click upon the rail which protected the hedge, and walked
away in the opposite direction. Giles knew in a moment that this
must be Mr. Fitzpiers. When he was gone, Winterborne pushed
through the hollies, and emerged close beside the interesting
object of their contemplation.

CHAPTER IX.

"I heard the bushes move long before I saw you," she began. "I
said first, 'it is some terrible beast;' next, 'it is a poacher;'
next, 'it is a friend!'"

He regarded her with a slight smile, weighing, not her speech, but
the question whether he should tell her that she had been watched.
He decided in the negative.

"You have been to the house?" he said. "But I need not ask." The
fact was that there shone upon Miss Melbury's face a species of
exaltation, which saw no environing details nor his own
occupation; nothing more than his bare presence.

"Why need you not ask?"

"Your face is like the face of Moses when he came down from the
Mount."

She reddened a little and said, "How can you be so profane, Giles
Winterborne?"

"How can you think so much of that class of people? Well, I beg
pardon; I didn't mean to speak so freely. How do you like her
house and her?"

"Exceedingly. I had not been inside the walls since I was a
child, when it used to be let to strangers, before Mrs. Charmond's
late husband bought the property. She is SO nice!" And Grace fell
into such an abstracted gaze at the imaginary image of Mrs.
Charmond and her niceness that it almost conjured up a vision of
that lady in mid-air before them.

"She has only been here a month or two, it seems, and cannot stay
much longer, because she finds it so lonely and damp in winter.
She is going abroad. Only think, she would like me to go with
her."

Giles's features stiffened a little at the news. "Indeed; what
for? But I won't keep you standing here. Hoi, Robert!" he cried
to a swaying collection of clothes in the distance, which was the
figure of Creedle his man. "Go on filling in there till I come
back."

"I'm a-coming, sir; I'm a-coming."

"Well, the reason is this," continued she, as they went on
together--" Mrs. Charmond has a delightful side to her character--
a desire to record her impressions of travel, like Alexandre
Dumas, and Mery, and Sterne, and others. But she cannot find
energy enough to do it herself." And Grace proceeded to explain
Mrs. Charmond's proposal at large. "My notion is that Mery's
style will suit her best, because he writes in that soft,
emotional, luxurious way she has," Grace said, musingly.

"Indeed!" said Winterborne, with mock awe. "Suppose you talk over
my head a little longer, Miss Grace Melbury?"

"Oh, I didn't mean it!" she said, repentantly, looking into his
eyes. "And as for myself, I hate French books. And I love dear
old Hintock, AND THE PEOPLE IN IT, fifty times better than all the
Continent. But the scheme; I think it an enchanting notion, don't
you, Giles?"

"It is well enough in one sense, but it will take yon away," said
he, mollified.

"Only for a short time. We should return in May."

"Well, Miss Melbury, it is a question for your father."

Winterborne walked with her nearly to her house. He had awaited
her coming, mainly with the view of mentioning to her his proposal
to have a Christmas party; but homely Christmas gatherings in the
venerable and jovial Hintock style seemed so primitive and uncouth
beside the lofty matters of her converse and thought that he
refrained.

As soon as she was gone he turned back towards the scene of his
planting, and could not help saying to himself as he walked, that
this engagement of his was a very unpromising business. Her
outing to-day had not improved it. A woman who could go to
Hintock House and be friendly with its mistress, enter into the
views of its mistress, talk like her, and dress not much unlike
her, why, she would hardly be contented with him, a yeoman, now
immersed in tree-planting, even though he planted them well. "And
yet she's a true-hearted girl," he said, thinking of her words
about Hintock. "I must bring matters to a point, and there's an
end of it."

When he reached the plantation he found that Marty had come back,
and dismissing Creedle, he went on planting silently with the girl
as before.

"Suppose, Marty," he said, after a while, looking at her extended
arm, upon which old scratches from briers showed themselves purple
in the cold wind--"suppose you know a person, and want to bring
that person to a good understanding with you, do you think a
Christmas party of some sort is a warming-up thing, and likely to
be useful in hastening on the matter?"

"Is there to be dancing?"

"There might be, certainly."

"Will He dance with She?"

"Well, yes."

"Then it might bring things to a head, one way or the other; I
won't be the one to say which."

"It shall be done," said Winterborne, not to her, though he spoke
the words quite loudly. And as the day was nearly ended, he
added, "Here, Marty, I'll send up a man to plant the rest to-
morrow. I've other things to think of just now."

She did not inquire what other things, for she had seen him
walking with Grace Melbury. She looked towards the western sky,
which was now aglow like some vast foundery wherein new worlds
were being cast. Across it the bare bough of a tree stretched
horizontally, revealing every twig against the red, and showing in
dark profile every beck and movement of three pheasants that were
settling themselves down on it in a row to roost.

"It will be fine to-morrow," said Marty, observing them with the
vermilion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes, "for they
are a-croupied down nearly at the end of the bough. If it were
going to be stormy they'd squeeze close to the trunk. The weather
is almost all they have to think of, isn't it, Mr. Winterborne?
and so they must be lighter-hearted than we."

"I dare say they are," said Winterborne.

Before taking a single step in the preparations, Winterborne, with
no great hopes, went across that evening to the timber-merchant's
to ascertain if Grace and her parents would honor him with their
presence. Having first to set his nightly gins in the garden, to
catch the rabbits that ate his winter-greens, his call was delayed
till just after the rising of the moon, whose rays reached the
Hintock houses but fitfully as yet, on account of the trees.
Melbury was crossing his yard on his way to call on some one at
the larger village, but he readily turned and walked up and down
the path with the young man.

Giles, in his self-deprecatory sense of living on a much smaller
scale than the Melburys did, would not for the world imply that
his invitation was to a gathering of any importance. So he put it
in the mild form of "Can you come in for an hour, when you have
done business, the day after to-morrow; and Mrs. and Miss Melbury,
if they have nothing more pressing to do?"

Melbury would give no answer at once. "No, I can't tell you to-
day," he said. "I must talk it over with the women. As far as I
am concerned, my dear Giles, you know I'll come with pleasure.
But how do I know what Grace's notions may be? You see, she has
been away among cultivated folks a good while; and now this
acquaintance with Mrs. Charmond--Well, I'll ask her. I can say no
more."

When Winterborne was gone the timber-merchant went on his way. He
knew very well that Grace, whatever her own feelings, would either
go or not go, according as he suggested; and his instinct was, for
the moment, to suggest the negative. His errand took him past the
church, and the way to his destination was either across the
church-yard or along-side it, the distances being the same. For
some reason or other he chose the former way.

The moon was faintly lighting up the gravestones, and the path,
and the front of the building. Suddenly Mr. Melbury paused,
turned ill upon the grass, and approached a particular headstone,
where he read, "In memory of John Winterborne," with the subjoined
date and age. It was the grave of Giles's father.

The timber-merchant laid his hand upon the stone, and was
humanized. "Jack, my wronged friend!" he said. "I'll be faithful
to my plan of making amends to 'ee."

When he reached home that evening, he said to Grace and Mrs.
Melbury, who were working at a little table by the fire,

"Giles wants us to go down and spend an hour with him the day
after to-morrow; and I'm thinking, that as 'tis Giles who asks us,
we'll go."

They assented without demur, and accordingly the timber-merchant
sent Giles the next morning an answer in the affirmative.

Winterborne, in his modesty, or indifference, had mentioned no
particular hour in his invitation; and accordingly Mr. Melbury and
his family, expecting no other guests, chose their own time, which
chanced to be rather early in the afternoon, by reason of the
somewhat quicker despatch than usual of the timber-merchant's
business that day. To show their sense of the unimportance of the
occasion, they walked quite slowly to the house, as if they were
merely out for a ramble, and going to nothing special at all; or
at most intending to pay a casual call and take a cup of tea.

At this hour stir and bustle pervaded the interior of
Winterborne's domicile from cellar to apple-loft. He had planned
an elaborate high tea for six o'clock or thereabouts, and a good
roaring supper to come on about eleven. Being a bachelor of
rather retiring habits, the whole of the preparations devolved
upon himself and his trusty man and familiar, Robert Creedle, who
did everything that required doing, from making Giles's bed to
catching moles in his field. He was a survival from the days when
Giles's father held the homestead, and Giles was a playing boy.

These two, with a certain dilatoriousness which appertained to
both, were now in the heat of preparation in the bake-house,
expecting nobody before six o'clock. Winterborne was standing
before the brick oven in his shirt-sleeves, tossing in thorn
sprays, and stirring about the blazing mass with a long-handled,
three-pronged Beelzebub kind of fork, the heat shining out upon
his streaming face and making his eyes like furnaces, the thorns
crackling and sputtering; while Creedle, having ranged the pastry
dishes in a row on the table till the oven should be ready, was
pressing out the crust of a final apple-pie with a rolling-pin. A
great pot boiled on the fire, and through the open door of the
back kitchen a boy was seen seated on the fender, emptying the
snuffers and scouring the candlesticks, a row of the latter
standing upside down on the hob to melt out the grease

Looking up from the rolling-pin, Creedle saw passing the window
first the timber-merchant, in his second-best suit, Mrs. Melbury
in her best silk, and Grace in the fashionable attire which, in
part brought home with her from the Continent, she had worn on her
visit to Mrs. Charmond's. The eyes of the three had been
attracted to the proceedings within by the fierce illumination
which the oven threw out upon the operators and their utensils.

"Lord, Lord! if they baint come a'ready!" said Creedle.

"No--hey?" said Giles, looking round aghast; while the boy in the
background waved a reeking candlestick in his delight. As there
was no help for it, Winterborne went to meet them in the door-way.

"My dear Giles, I see we have made a mistake in the time," said
the timber-merchant's wife, her face lengthening with concern.

"Oh, it is not much difference. I hope you'll come in."

"But this means a regular randyvoo!" said Mr. Melbury, accusingly,
glancing round and pointing towards the bake-house with his stick.

"Well, yes," said Giles.

"And--not Great Hintock band, and dancing, surely?"

"I told three of 'em they might drop in if they'd nothing else to
do," Giles mildly admitted.

"Now, why the name didn't ye tell us 'twas going to be a serious
kind of thing before? How should I know what folk mean if they
don't say? Now, shall we come in, or shall we go home and come
back along in a couple of hours?"

"I hope you'll stay, if you'll be so good as not to mind, now you
are here. I shall have it all right and tidy in a very little
time. I ought not to have been so backward." Giles spoke quite
anxiously for one of his undemonstrative temperament; for he
feared that if the Melburys once were back in their own house they
would not be disposed to turn out again.

"'Tis we ought not to have been so forward; that's what 'tis,"
said Mr. Melbury, testily. "Don't keep us here in the sitting-
room; lead on to the bakehouse, man. Now we are here we'll help
ye get ready for the rest. Here, mis'ess, take off your things,
and help him out in his baking, or he won't get done to-night.
I'll finish heating the oven, and set you free to go and skiver up
them ducks." His eye had passed with pitiless directness of
criticism into yet remote recesses of Winterborne's awkwardly
built premises, where the aforesaid birds were hanging.

"And I'll help finish the tarts," said Grace, cheerfully.

"I don't know about that," said her father. "'Tisn't quite so
much in your line as it is in your mother-law's and mine."

"Of course I couldn't let you, Grace!" said Giles, with some
distress.

"I'll do it, of course," said Mrs. Melbury, taking off her silk
train, hanging it up to a nail, carefully rolling back her
sleeves, pinning them to her shoulders, and stripping Giles of his
apron for her own use.

So Grace pottered idly about, while her father and his wife helped
on the preparations. A kindly pity of his household management,
which Winterborne saw in her eyes whenever he caught them,
depressed him much more than her contempt would have done.

Creedle met Giles at the pump after a while, when each of the
others was absorbed in the difficulties of a cuisine based on
utensils, cupboards, and provisions that were strange to them. He
groaned to the young man in a whisper, "This is a bruckle het,
maister, I'm much afeared! Who'd ha' thought they'd ha' come so
soon?"

The bitter placidity of Winterborne's look adumbrated the
misgivings he did not care to express. "Have you got the celery
ready?" he asked, quickly.

"Now that's a thing I never could mind; no, not if you'd paid me
in silver and gold. And I don't care who the man is, I says that
a stick of celery that isn't scrubbed with the scrubbing-brush is
not clean."

"Very well, very well! I'll attend to it. You go and get 'em
comfortable in-doors."

He hastened to the garden, and soon returned, tossing the stalks
to Creedle, who was still in a tragic mood. "If ye'd ha' married,
d'ye see, maister," he said, "this caddle couldn't have happened
to us."

Everything being at last under way, the oven set, and all done
that could insure the supper turning up ready at some time or
other, Giles and his friends entered the parlor, where the
Melburys again dropped into position as guests, though the room
was not nearly so warm and cheerful as the blazing bakehouse.
Others now arrived, among them Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-
turner, and tea went off very well.

Grace's disposition to make the best of everything, and to wink at
deficiencies in Winterborne's menage, was so uniform and
persistent that he suspected her of seeing even more deficiencies
than he was aware of. That suppressed sympathy which had showed
in her face ever since her arrival told him as much too plainly.

"This muddling style of house-keeping is what you've not lately
been used to, I suppose?" he said, when they were a little apart.

"No; but I like it; it reminds me so pleasantly that everything
here in dear old Hintock is just as it used to be. The oil is--
not quite nice; but everything else is."

"The oil?"

"On the chairs, I mean; because it gets on one's dress. Still,
mine is not a new one."

Giles found that Creedle, in his zeal to make things look bright,
had smeared the chairs with some greasy kind of furniture-polish,
and refrained from rubbing it dry in order not to diminish the
mirror-like effect that the mixture produced as laid on. Giles
apologized and called Creedle; but he felt that the Fates were
against him.

CHAPTER X.

Supper-time came, and with it the hot-baked from the oven, laid on
a snowy cloth fresh from the press, and reticulated with folds, as
in Flemish "Last Suppers."  Creedle and the boy fetched and
carried with amazing alacrity, the latter, to mollify his superior
and make things pleasant, expressing his admiration of Creedle's
cleverness when they were alone.

"I s'pose the time when you learned all these knowing things, Mr.
Creedle, was when you was in the militia?"

"Well, yes. I seed the world at that time somewhat, certainly,
and many ways of strange dashing life. Not but that Giles has
worked hard in helping me to bring things to such perfection to-
day. 'Giles,' says I, though he's maister. Not that I should
call'n maister by rights, for his father growed up side by side
with me, as if one mother had twinned us and been our nourishing."

"I s'pose your memory can reach a long way back into history, Mr.
Creedle?"

"Oh yes. Ancient days, when there was battles and famines and
hang-fairs and other pomps, seem to me as yesterday. Ah, many's
the patriarch I've seed come and go in this parish! There, he's
calling for more plates. Lord, why can't 'em turn their plates
bottom upward for pudding, as they used to do in former days?"

Meanwhile, in the adjoining room Giles was presiding in a half-
unconscious state. He could not get over the initial failures in
his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that
he was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually
snuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mere
glimmers drowned in their own grease. Creedle now appeared with a
specially prepared dish, which he served by elevating the little
three-legged pot that contained it, and tilting the contents into
a dish, exclaiming, simultaneously, "Draw back, gentlemen and
ladies, please!"

A splash followed. Grace gave a quick, involuntary nod and blink,
and put her handkerchief to her face.

"Good heavens! what did you do that for, Creedle?" said Giles,
sternly, and jumping up.

"'Tis how I do it when they baint here, maister," mildly
expostulated Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company.

"Well, yes--but--" replied Giles. He went over to Grace, and
hoped none of it had gone into her eye.

"Oh no," she said. "Only a sprinkle on my face. It was nothing."

"Kiss it and make it well," gallantly observed Mr. Bawtree.

Miss Melbury blushed.

The timber-merchant said, quickly, "Oh, it is nothing! She must
bear these little mishaps." But there could be discerned in his
face something which said "I ought to have foreseen this."

Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not
quite liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such
people as Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in
dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty. In
his mind's eye, before the event, they had been the mere
background or padding of the scene, but somehow in reality they
were the most prominent personages there.

After supper they played cards, Bawtree and the hollow-turner
monopolizing the new packs for an interminable game, in which a
lump of chalk was incessantly used--a game those two always played
wherever they were, taking a solitary candle and going to a
private table in a corner with the mien of persons bent on weighty
matters. The rest of the company on this account were obliged to
put up with old packs for their round game, that had been lying by
in a drawer ever since the time that Gliles's grandmother was
alive. Each card had a great stain in the middle of its back,
produced by the touch of generations of damp and excited thumbs
now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens wore a
decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an
impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums
than real regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively
few remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded
on by the measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner
from the back of the room:

    "And I' will hold' a wa'-ger with you'
     That all' these marks' are thirt'-y two!"

accompanied by rapping strokes with the chalk on the table; then
an exclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards; then the
commencement of the rhymes anew.

The timber-merchant showed his feelings by talking with a
satisfied sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party
in a patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he
and his were not enjoying themselves.

"Oh yes, yes; pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I
didn't know you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy" (to his
wife), "you ought to get some like them for ourselves." And when
they had abandoned cards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury
by the fire, it was the timber-merchant who stood with his back to
the mantle in a proprietary attitude, from which post of vantage
he critically regarded Giles's person, rather as a superficies
than as a solid with ideas and feelings inside it, saying, "What a
splendid coat that one is you have on, Giles! I can't get such
coats. You dress better than I."

After supper there was a dance, the bandsmen from Great Hintock
having arrived some time before. Grace had been away from home so
long that she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not
join in the movement. Then Giles felt that all was over. As for
her, she was thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very
different measure that she had been accustomed to tread with a
bevy of sylph-like creatures in muslin, in the music-room of a
large house, most of whom were now moving in scenes widely removed
from this, both as regarded place and character.

A woman she did not know came and offered to tell her fortune with
the abandoned cards. Grace assented to the proposal, and the
woman told her tale unskilfully, for want of practice, as she
declared.

Mr. Melbury was standing by, and exclaimed, contemptuously, "Tell
her fortune, indeed! Her fortune has been told by men of science--
what do you call 'em? Phrenologists. You can't teach her anything
new. She's been too far among the wise ones to be astonished at
anything she can hear among us folks in Hintock."

At last the time came for breaking up, Melbury and his family
being the earliest to leave, the two card-players still pursuing
their game doggedly in the corner, where they had completely
covered Giles's mahogany table with chalk scratches. The three
walked home, the distance being short and the night clear.

"Well, Giles is a very good fellow," said Mr. Melbury, as they
struck down the lane under boughs which formed a black filigree in
which the stars seemed set.

"Certainly he is, said Grace, quickly, and in such a tone as to
show that he stood no lower, if no higher, in her regard than he
had stood before.

When they were opposite an opening through which, by day, the
doctor's house could be seen, they observed a light in one of his
rooms, although it was now about two o'clock.

"The doctor is not abed yet," said Mrs. Melbury.

"Hard study, no doubt," said her husband.

"One would think that, as he seems to have nothing to do about
here by day, he could at least afford to go to bed early at night.
'Tis astonishing how little we see of him."

Melbury's mind seemed to turn with much relief to the
contemplation of Mr. Fitzpiers after the scenes of the evening.
"It is natural enough," he replied. "What can a man of that sort
find to interest him in Hintock? I don't expect he'll stay here
long."

His mind reverted to Giles's party, and when they were nearly home
he spoke again, his daughter being a few steps in advance: "It is
hardly the line of life for a girl like Grace, after what she's
been accustomed to. I didn't foresee that in sending her to
boarding-school and letting her travel, and what not, to make her
a good bargain for Giles, I should be really spoiling her for him.
Ah, 'tis a thousand pities! But he ought to have her--he ought!"

At this moment the two exclusive, chalk-mark men, having at last
really finished their play, could be heard coming along in the
rear, vociferously singing a song to march-time, and keeping
vigorous step to the same in far-reaching strides--

     "She may go, oh!
      She may go, oh!
      She may go to the d---- for me!"

The timber-merchant turned indignantly to Mrs. Melbury. "That's
the sort of society we've been asked to meet," he said. "For us
old folk it didn't matter; but for Grace--Giles should have known
better!"

Meanwhile, in the empty house from which the guests had just
cleared out, the subject of their discourse was walking from room
to room surveying the general displacement of furniture with no
ecstatic feeling; rather the reverse, indeed. At last he entered
the bakehouse, and found there Robert Creedle sitting over the
embers, also lost in contemplation. Winterborne sat down beside
him.

"Well, Robert, you must be tired. You'd better get on to bed."

"Ay, ay, Giles--what do I call ye? Maister, I would say. But 'tis
well to think the day IS done, when 'tis done."

Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled
forehead was ploughing abroad the wood-embers on the broad hearth,
till it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot bowlders
lying about everywhere. "Do you think it went off well, Creedle?"
he asked.

"The victuals did; that I know. And the drink did; that I
steadfastly believe, from the holler sound of the barrels. Good,
honest drink 'twere, the headiest mead I ever brewed; and the best
wine that berries could rise to; and the briskest Horner-and-
Cleeves cider ever wrung down, leaving out the spice and sperrits
I put into it, while that egg-flip would ha' passed through
muslin, so little curdled 'twere. 'Twas good enough to make any
king's heart merry--ay, to make his whole carcass smile. Still, I
don't deny I'm afeared some things didn't go well with He and
his." Creedle nodded in a direction which signified where the
Melburys lived.

"I'm afraid, too, that it was a failure there!"

"If so, 'twere doomed to be so. Not but what that snail might as
well have come upon anybody else's plate as hers."

"What snail?"

"Well, maister, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate
when I brought it out; and so it must have been in her few leaves
of wintergreen."

"How the deuce did a snail get there?"

"That I don't know no more than the dead; but there my gentleman
was."

"But, Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn't have
been!"

"Well, 'twas his native home, come to that; and where else could
we expect him to be? I don't care who the man is, snails and
caterpillars always will lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in
that tantalizing way."

"He wasn't alive, I suppose?" said Giles, with a shudder on
Grace's account.

"Oh no. He was well boiled. I warrant him well boiled. God
forbid that a LIVE snail should be seed on any plate of victuals
that's served by Robert Creedle....But Lord, there; I don't mind
'em myself--them small ones, for they were born on cabbage, and
they've lived on cabbage, so they must be made of cabbage. But
she, the close-mouthed little lady, she didn't say a word about
it; though 'twould have made good small conversation as to the
nater of such creatures; especially as wit ran short among us
sometimes."

"Oh yes--'tis all over!" murmured Giles to himself, shaking his
head over the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead
more than ever. "Do you know, Robert," he said, "that she's been
accustomed to servants and everything superfine these many years?
How, then, could she stand our ways?"

"Well, all I can say is, then, that she ought to hob-and-nob
elsewhere. They shouldn't have schooled her so monstrous high, or
else bachelor men shouldn't give randys, or if they do give 'em,
only to their own race."

"Perhaps that's true," said Winterborne, rising and yawning a
sigh.

CHAPTER XI.

"'Tis a pity--a thousand pities!" her father kept saying next
morning at breakfast, Grace being still in her bedroom.

But how could he, with any self-respect, obstruct Winterborne's
suit at this stage, and nullify a scheme he had labored to
promote--was, indeed, mechanically promoting at this moment? A
crisis was approaching, mainly as a result of his contrivances,
and it would have to be met.

But here was the fact, which could not be disguised: since seeing
what an immense change her last twelve months of absence had
produced in his daughter, after the heavy sum per annum that he
had been spending for several years upon her education, he was
reluctant to let her marry Giles Winterborne, indefinitely
occupied as woodsman, cider-merchant, apple-farmer, and what not,
even were she willing to marry him herself.

"She will be his wife if you don't upset her notion that she's
bound to accept him as an understood thing," said Mrs. Melbury.
"Bless ye, she'll soon shake down here in Hintock, and be content
with Giles's way of living, which he'll improve with what money
she'll have from you. 'Tis the strangeness after her genteel life
that makes her feel uncomfortable at first. Why, when I saw
Hintock the first time I thought I never could like it. But
things gradually get familiar, and stone floors seem not so very
cold and hard, and the hooting of the owls not so very dreadful,
and loneliness not so very lonely, after a while."

"Yes, I believe ye. That's just it. I KNOW Grace will gradually
sink down to our level again, and catch our manners and way of
speaking, and feel a drowsy content in being Giles's wife. But I
can't bear the thought of dragging down to that old level as
promising a piece of maidenhood as ever lived--fit to ornament a
palace wi'--that I've taken so much trouble to lift up. Fancy her
white hands getting redder every day, and her tongue losing its
pretty up-country curl in talking, and her bounding walk becoming
the regular Hintock shail and wamble!"

"She may shail, but she'll never wamble," replied his wife,
decisively.

When Grace came down-stairs he complained of her lying in bed so
late; not so much moved by a particular objection to that form of
indulgence as discomposed by these other reflections.

The corners of her pretty mouth dropped a little down. "You used
to complain with justice when I was a girl," she said. "But I am
a woman now, and can judge for myself....But it is not that; it is
something else!" Instead of sitting down she went outside the
door.

He was sorry. The petulance that relatives show towards each
other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality which
has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the
offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor
humanity in irritated mood. Melbury followed her. She had
rambled on to the paddock, where the white frost lay, and where
starlings in flocks of twenties and thirties were walking about,
watched by a comfortable family of sparrows perched in a line
along the string-course of the chimney, preening themselves in the
rays of the sun.

"Come in to breakfast, my girl," he said. "And as to Giles, use
your own mind. Whatever pleases you will please me."

"I am promised to him, father; and I cannot help thinking that in
honor I ought to marry him, whenever I do marry."

He had a strong suspicion that somewhere in the bottom of her
heart there pulsed an old simple indigenous feeling favorable to
Giles, though it had become overlaid with implanted tastes. But
he would not distinctly express his views on the promise. "Very
well," he said. "But I hope I sha'n't lose you yet. Come in to
breakfast. What did you think of the inside of Hintock House the
other day?"

"I liked it much."

"Different from friend Winterborne's?"

She said nothing; but he who knew her was aware that she meant by
her silence to reproach him with drawing cruel comparisons.

"Mrs. Charmond has asked you to come again--when, did you say?"

"She thought Tuesday, but would send the day before to let me know
if it suited her." And with this subject upon their lips they
entered to breakfast.

Tuesday came, but no message from Mrs. Charmond. Nor was there
any on Wednesday. In brief, a fortnight slipped by without a
sign, and it looked suspiciously as if Mrs. Charmond were not
going further in the direction of "taking up" Grace at present.

Her father reasoned thereon. Immediately after his daughter's two
indubitable successes with Mrs. Charmond--the interview in the
wood and a visit to the House--she had attended Winterborne's
party. No doubt the out-and-out joviality of that gathering had
made it a topic in the neighborhood, and that every one present as
guests had been widely spoken of--Grace, with her exceptional
qualities, above all. What, then, so natural as that Mrs.
Charmond should have heard the village news, and become quite
disappointed in her expectations of Grace at finding she kept such
company?

Full of this post hoc argument, Mr. Melbury overlooked the
infinite throng of other possible reasons and unreasons for a
woman changing her mind. For instance, while knowing that his
Grace was attractive, he quite forgot that Mrs. Charmond had also
great pretensions to beauty. In his simple estimate, an
attractive woman attracted all around.

So it was settled in his mind that her sudden mingling with the
villagers at the unlucky Winterborne's was the cause of her most
grievous loss, as he deemed it, in the direction of Hintock House.

"'Tis a thousand pities!" he would repeat to himself. "I am
ruining her for conscience' sake!"

It was one morning later on, while these things were agitating his
mind, that, curiously enough, something darkened the window just
as they finished breakfast. Looking up, they saw Giles in person
mounted on horseback, and straining his neck forward, as he had
been doing for some time, to catch their attention through the
window. Grace had been the first to see him, and involuntarily
exclaimed, "There he is--and a new horse!"

On their faces as they regarded Giles were written their suspended
thoughts and compound feelings concerning him, could he have read
them through those old panes. But he saw nothing: his features
just now were, for a wonder, lit up with a red smile at some other
idea. So they rose from breakfast and went to the door, Grace
with an anxious, wistful manner, her father in a reverie, Mrs.
Melbury placid and inquiring. "We have come out to look at your
horse," she said.

It could be seen that he was pleased at their attention, and
explained that he had ridden a mile or two to try the animal's
paces. "I bought her," he added, with warmth so severely
repressed as to seem indifference, "because she has been used to
carry a lady."

Still Mr. Melbury did not brighten. Mrs. Melbury said, "And is
she quiet?"

Winterborne assured her that there was no doubt of it. "I took
care of that. She's five-and-twenty, and very clever for her
age."

"Well, get off and come in," said Melbury, brusquely; and Giles
dismounted accordingly.

This event was the concrete result of Winterborne's thoughts
during the past week or two. The want of success with his evening
party he had accepted in as philosophic a mood as he was capable
of; but there had been enthusiasm enough left in him one day at
Sherton Abbas market to purchase this old mare, which had belonged
to a neighboring parson with several daughters, and was offered
him to carry either a gentleman or a lady, and to do odd jobs of
carting and agriculture at a pinch. This obliging quadruped
seemed to furnish Giles with a means of reinstating himself in
Melbury's good opinion as a man of considerateness by throwing out
future possibilities to Grace.

The latter looked at him with intensified interest this morning,
in the mood which is altogether peculiar to woman's nature, and
which, when reduced into plain words, seems as impossible as the
penetrability of matter--that of entertaining a tender pity for
the object of her own unnecessary coldness. The imperturbable
poise which marked Winterborne in general was enlivened now by a
freshness and animation that set a brightness in his eye and on
his cheek. Mrs. Melbury asked him to have some breakfast, and he
pleasurably replied that he would join them, with his usual lack
of tactical observation, not perceiving that they had all finished
the meal, that the hour was inconveniently late, and that the note
piped by the kettle denoted it to be nearly empty; so that fresh
water had to be brought in, trouble taken to make it boil, and a
general renovation of the table carried out. Neither did he know,
so full was he of his tender ulterior object in buying that horse,
how many cups of tea he was gulping down one after another, nor
how the morning was slipping, nor how he was keeping the family
from dispersing about their duties.

Then he told throughout the humorous story of the horse's
purchase,looking particularly grim at some fixed object in the
room, a way he always looked when he narrated anything that amused
him. While he was still thinking of the scene he had described,
Grace rose and said, "I have to go and help my mother now, Mr.
Winterborne."

"H'm!" he ejaculated, turning his eyes suddenly upon her.

She repeated her words with a slight blush of awkwardness;
whereupon Giles, becoming suddenly conscious, too conscious,
jumped up, saying, "To be sure, to be sure!" wished them quickly
good-morning, and bolted out of the house.

Nevertheless he had, upon the whole, strengthened his position,
with her at least. Time, too, was on his side, for (as her father
saw with some regret) already the homeliness of Hintock life was
fast becoming effaced from her observation as a singularity; just
as the first strangeness of a face from which we have for years
been separated insensibly passes off with renewed intercourse, and
tones itself down into simple identity with the lineaments of the
past.

Thus Mr. Melbury went out of the house still unreconciled to the
sacrifice of the gem he had been at such pains in mounting. He
fain could hope, in the secret nether chamber of his mind, that
something would happen, before the balance of her feeling had
quite turned in Winterborne's favor, to relieve his conscience and
preserve her on her elevated plane.

He could not forget that Mrs. Charmond had apparently abandoned
all interest in his daughter as suddenly as she had conceived it,
and was as firmly convinced as ever that the comradeship which
Grace had shown with Giles and his crew by attending his party had
been the cause.

Matters lingered on thus. And then, as a hoop by gentle knocks on
this side and on that is made to travel in specific directions,
the little touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl
shaped the curves of her career.

CHAPTER XII.

It was a day of rather bright weather for the season. Miss
Melbury went out for a morning walk, and her ever-regardful
father, having an hour's leisure, offered to walk with her. The
breeze was fresh and quite steady, filtering itself through the
denuded mass of twigs without swaying them, but making the point
of each ivy-leaf on the trunks scratch its underlying neighbor
restlessly. Grace's lips sucked in this native air of hers like
milk. They soon reached a place where the wood ran down into a
corner, and went outside it towards comparatively open ground.
Having looked round about, they were intending to re-enter the
copse when a fox quietly emerged with a dragging brush, trotted
past them tamely as a domestic cat, and disappeared amid some dead
fern. They walked on, her father merely observing, after watching
the animal, "They are hunting somewhere near."

Farther up they saw in the mid-distance the hounds running hither
and thither, as if there were little or no scent that day. Soon
divers members of the hunt appeared on the scene, and it was
evident from their movements that the chase had been stultified by
general puzzle-headedness as to the whereabouts of the intended
victim. In a minute a farmer rode up to the two pedestrians,
panting with acteonic excitement, and Grace being a few steps in
advance, he addressed her, asking if she had seen the fox.

"Yes," said she. "We saw him some time ago--just out there."

"Did you cry Halloo?"

"We said nothing."

"Then why the d--- didn't you, or get the old buffer to do it for
you?" said the man, as he cantered away.

She looked rather disconcerted at this reply, and observing her
father's face, saw that it was quite red.

"He ought not to have spoken to ye like that!" said the old man,
in the tone of one whose heart was bruised, though it was not by
the epithet applied to himself. "And he wouldn't if he had been a
gentleman. 'Twas not the language to use to a woman of any
niceness. You, so well read and cultivated--how could he expect
ye to know what tom-boy field-folk are in the habit of doing? If
so be you had just come from trimming swedes or mangolds--joking
with the rough work-folk and all that--I could have stood it. But
hasn't it cost me near a hundred a year to lift you out of all
that, so as to show an example to the neighborhood of what a woman
can be? Grace, shall I tell you the secret of it? 'Twas because I
was in your company. If a black-coated squire or pa'son had been
walking with you instead of me he wouldn't have spoken so."

"No, no, father; there's nothing in you rough or ill-mannered!"

"I tell you it is that! I've noticed, and I've noticed it many
times, that a woman takes her color from the man she's walking
with. The woman who looks an unquestionable lady when she's with
a polished-up fellow, looks a mere tawdry imitation article when
she's hobbing and nobbing with a homely blade. You sha'n't be
treated like that for long, or at least your children sha'n't.
You shall have somebody to walk with you who looks more of a dandy
than I--please God you shall!"

"But, my dear father," she said, much distressed, "I don't mind at
all. I don't wish for more honor than I already have!"

"A perplexing and ticklish possession is a daughter," according to
Menander or some old Greek poet, and to nobody was one ever more
so than to Melbury, by reason of her very dearness to him. As for
Grace, she began to feel troubled; she did not perhaps wish there
and then to unambitiously devote her life to Giles Winterborne,
but she was conscious of more and more uneasiness at the
possibility of being the social hope of the family.

"You would like to have more honor, if it pleases me?" asked her
father, in continuation of the subject.

Despite her feeling she assented to this. His reasoning had not
been without its weight upon her.

"Grace," he said, just before they had reached the house, "if it
costs me my life you shall marry well! To-day has shown me that
whatever a young woman's niceness, she stands for nothing alone.
You shall marry well."

He breathed heavily, and his breathing was caught up by the
breeze, which seemed to sigh a soft remonstrance.

She looked calmly at him. "And how about Mr. Winterborne?" she
asked. "I mention it, father, not as a matter of sentiment, but
as a question of keeping faith."

The timber-merchant's eyes fell for a moment. "I don't know--I
don't know," he said. "'Tis a trying strait. Well, well; there's
no hurry. We'll wait and see how he gets on."

That evening he called her into his room, a snug little apartment
behind the large parlor. It had at one time been part of the
bakehouse, with the ordinary oval brick oven in the wall; but Mr.
Melbury, in turning it into an office, had built into the cavity
an iron safe, which he used for holding his private papers. The
door of the safe was now open, and his keys were hanging from it.

"Sit down, Grace, and keep me company," he said. "You may amuse
yourself by looking over these." He threw out a heap of papers
before her.

"What are they?" she asked.

"Securities of various sorts." He unfolded them one by one.
"Papers worth so much money each. Now here's a lot of turnpike
bonds for one thing. Would you think that each of these pieces of
paper is worth two hundred pounds?"

"No, indeed, if you didn't say so."

"'Tis so, then. Now here are papers of another sort. They are
for different sums in the three-per-cents. Now these are Port
Breedy Harbor bonds. We have a great stake in that harbor, you
know, because I send off timber there. Open the rest at your
pleasure. They'll interest ye."

"Yes, I will, some day," said she, rising.

"Nonsense, open them now. You ought to learn a little of such
matters. A young lady of education should not be ignorant of
money affairs altogether. Suppose you should be left a widow some
day, with your husband's title-deeds and investments thrown upon
your hands--"

"Don't say that, father--title-deeds; it sounds so vain!"

"It does not. Come to that, I have title-deeds myself. There,
that piece of parchment represents houses in Sherton Abbas."

"Yes, but--" She hesitated, looked at the fire, and went on in a
low voice: "If what has been arranged about me should come to
anything, my sphere will be quite a middling one."

"Your sphere ought not to be middling," he exclaimed, not in
passion, but in earnest conviction. "You said you never felt more
at home, more in your element, anywhere than you did that
afternoon with Mrs. Charmond, when she showed you her house and
all her knick-knacks, and made you stay to tea so nicely in her
drawing-room--surely you did!"

"Yes, I did say so," admitted Grace.

"Was it true?"

"Yes, I felt so at the time. The feeling is less strong now,
perhaps."

"Ah! Now, though you don't see it, your feeling at the time was
the right one, because your mind and body were just in full and
fresh cultivation, so that going there with her was like meeting
like. Since then you've been biding with us, and have fallen back
a little, and so you don't feel your place so strongly. Now, do
as I tell ye, and look over these papers and see what you'll be
worth some day. For they'll all be yours, you know; who have I
got to leave 'em to but you? Perhaps when your education is
backed up by what these papers represent, and that backed up by
another such a set and their owner, men such as that fellow was
this morning may think you a little more than a buffer's girl."

So she did as commanded, and opened each of the folded
representatives of hard cash that her father put before her. To
sow in her heart cravings for social position was obviously his
strong desire, though in direct antagonism to a better feeling
which had hitherto prevailed with him, and had, indeed, only
succumbed that morning during the ramble.

She wished that she was not his worldly hope; the responsibility
of such a position was too great. She had made it for herself
mainly by her appearance and attractive behavior to him since her
return. "If I had only come home in a shabby dress, and tried to
speak roughly, this might not have happened," she thought. She
deplored less the fact than the sad possibilities that might lie
hidden therein.

Her father then insisted upon her looking over his checkbook and
reading the counterfoils. This, also, she obediently did, and at
last came to two or three which had been drawn to defray some of
the late expenses of her clothes, board, and education.

"I, too, cost a good deal, like the horses and wagons and corn,"
she said, looking up sorrily.

"I didn't want you to look at those; I merely meant to give you an
idea of my investment transactions. But if you do cost as much as
they, never mind. You'll yield a better return."

"Don't think of me like that!" she begged. "A mere chattel."

"A what? Oh, a dictionary word. Well, as that's in your line I
don't forbid it, even if it tells against me," he said, good-
humoredly. And he looked her proudly up and down.

A few minutes later Grammer Oliver came to tell them that supper
was ready, and in giving the information she added, incidentally,
"So we shall soon lose the mistress of Hintock House for some
time, I hear, Maister Melbury. Yes, she's going off to foreign
parts to-morrow, for the rest of the winter months; and be-chok'd
if I don't wish I could do the same, for my wynd-pipe is furred
like a flue."

When the old woman had left the room, Melbury turned to his
daughter and said, "So, Grace, you've lost your new friend, and
your chance of keeping her company and writing her travels is
quite gone from ye!"

Grace said nothing.

"Now," he went on, emphatically, "'tis Winterborne's affair has
done this. Oh yes, 'tis. So let me say one word. Promise me
that you will not meet him again without my knowledge."

"I never do meet him, father, either without your knowledge or
with it."

"So much the better. I don't like the look of this at all. And I
say it not out of harshness to him, poor fellow, but out of
tenderness to you. For how could a woman, brought up delicately
as you have been, bear the roughness of a life with him?"

She sighed; it was a sigh of sympathy with Giles, complicated by a
sense of the intractability of circumstances.

At that same hour, and almost at that same minute, there was a
conversation about Winterborne in progress in the village street,
opposite Mr. Melbury's gates, where Timothy Tangs the elder and
Robert Creedle had accidentally met.

The sawyer was asking Creedle if he had heard what was all over
the parish, the skin of his face being drawn two ways on the
matter--towards brightness in respect of it as news, and towards
concern in respect of it as circumstance.

"Why, that poor little lonesome thing, Marty South, is likely to
lose her father. He was almost well, but is much worse again. A
man all skin and grief he ever were, and if he leave Little
Hintock for a better land, won't it make some difference to your
Maister Winterborne, neighbor Creedle?"

"Can I be a prophet in Israel?" said Creedle. "Won't it! I was
only shaping of such a thing yesterday in my poor, long-seeing
way, and all the work of the house upon my one shoulders! You know
what it means? It is upon John South's life that all Mr.
Winterborne's houses hang. If so be South die, and so make his
decease, thereupon the law is that the houses fall without the
least chance of absolution into HER hands at the House. I told
him so; but the words of the faithful be only as wind!"

CHAPTER XIII.

The news was true. The life--the one fragile life--that had been
used as a measuring-tape of time by law, was in danger of being
frayed away. It was the last of a group of lives which had served
this purpose, at the end of whose breathings the small homestead
occupied by South himself, the larger one of Giles Winterborne,
and half a dozen others that had been in the possession of various
Hintock village families for the previous hundred years, and were
now Winterborne's, would fall in and become part of the
encompassing estate.

Yet a short two months earlier Marty's father, aged fifty-five
years, though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have
been looked on as a man whose existence was so far removed from
hazardous as any in the parish, and as bidding fair to be
prolonged for another quarter of a century.

Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the
contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the cabbage-
plots, the apple-trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar, wring-house,
stables, and weathercock, were all slipping away over his head and
beneath his feet, as if they were painted on a magic-lantern
slide, was curious. In spite of John South's late indisposition
he had not anticipated danger. To inquire concerning his health
had been to show less sympathy than to remain silent, considering
the material interest he possessed in the woodman's life, and he
had, accordingly, made a point of avoiding Marty's house.

While he was here in the garden somebody came to fetch him. It
was Marty herself, and she showed her distress by her
unconsciousness of a cropped poll.

"Father is still so much troubled in his mind about that tree,"
she said. "You know the tree I mean, Mr. Winterborne? the tall
one in front of the house, that he thinks will blow down and kill
us. Can you come and see if you can persuade him out of his
notion? I can do nothing."

He accompanied her to the cottage, and she conducted him up-
stairs. John South was pillowed up in a chair between the bed and
the window exactly opposite the latter, towards which his face was
turned.

"Ah, neighbor Winterborne," he said. "I wouldn't have minded if
my life had only been my own to lose; I don't vallie it in much of
itself, and can let it go if 'tis required of me. But to think
what 'tis worth to you, a young man rising in life, that do
trouble me! It seems a trick of dishonesty towards ye to go off at
fifty-five! I could bear up, I know I could, if it were not for
the tree--yes, the tree, 'tis that's killing me. There he stands,
threatening my life every minute that the wind do blow. He'll
come down upon us and squat us dead; and what will ye do when the
life on your property is taken away?"

"Never you mind me--that's of no consequence," said Giles. "Think
of yourself alone."

He looked out of the window in the direction of the woodman's
gaze. The tree was a tall elm, familiar to him from childhood,
which stood at a distance of two-thirds its own height from the
front of South's dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now,
the tree rocked, naturally enough; and the sight of its motion and
sound of its sighs had gradually bred the terrifying illusion in
the woodman's mind that it would descend and kill him. Thus he
would sit all day, in spite of persuasion, watching its every
sway, and listening to the melancholy Gregorian melodies which the
air wrung out of it. This fear it apparently was, rather than any
organic disease which was eating away the health of John South.

As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man
with abject obedience. "Ah, when it was quite a small tree," he
said, "and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it
off with my hook to make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off
doing it, and then I again thought that I would; but I forgot it,
and didn't. And at last it got too big, and now 'tis my enemy,
and will be the death o' me. Little did I think, when I let that
sapling stay, that a time would come when it would torment me, and
dash me into my grave."

"No, no," said Winterborne and Marty, soothingly. But they
thought it possible that it might hasten him into his grave,
though in another way than by falling.

"I tell you what," added Winterborne, "I'll climb up this
afternoon and shroud off the lower boughs, and then it won't be so
heavy, and the wind won't affect it so."

"She won't allow it--a strange woman come from nobody knows where--
she won't have it done."

"You mean Mrs. Charmond? Oh, she doesn't know there's such a tree
on her estate. Besides, shrouding is not felling, and I'll risk
that much."

He went out, and when afternoon came he returned, took a billhook
from the woodman's shed, and with a ladder climbed into the lower
part of the tree, where he began lopping off--"shrouding," as they
called it at Hintock--the lowest boughs. Each of these quivered
under his attack, bent, cracked, and fell into the hedge. Having
cut away the lowest tier, he stepped off the ladder, climbed a few
steps higher, and attacked those at the next level. Thus he
ascended with the progress of his work far above the top of the
ladder, cutting away his perches as he went, and leaving nothing
but a bare stem below him.

The work was troublesome, for the tree was large. The afternoon
wore on, turning dark and misty about four o'clock. From time to
time Giles cast his eyes across towards the bedroom window of
South, where, by the flickering fire in the chamber, he could see
the old man watching him, sitting motionless with a hand upon each
arm of the chair. Beside him sat Marty, also straining her eyes
towards the skyey field of his operations.

A curious question suddenly occurred to Winterborne, and he
stopped his chopping. He was operating on another person's
property to prolong the years of a lease by whose termination that
person would considerably benefit. In that aspect of the case he
doubted if he ought to go on. On the other hand he was working to
save a man's life, and this seemed to empower him to adopt
arbitrary measures.

The wind had died down to a calm, and while he was weighing the
circumstances he saw coming along the road through the increasing
mist a figure which, indistinct as it was, he knew well. It was
Grace Melbury, on her way out from the house, probably for a short
evening walk before dark. He arranged himself for a greeting from
her, since she could hardly avoid passing immediately beneath the
tree.

But Grace, though she looked up and saw him, was just at that time
too full of the words of her father to give him any encouragement.
The years-long regard that she had had for him was not kindled by
her return into a flame of sufficient brilliancy to make her
rebellious. Thinking that she might not see him, he cried, "Miss
Melbury, here I am."

She looked up again. She was near enough to see the expression of
his face, and the nails in his soles, silver-bright with constant
walking. But she did not reply; and dropping her glance again,
went on.

Winterborne's face grew strange; he mused, and proceeded
automatically with his work. Grace meanwhile had not gone far.
She had reached a gate, whereon she had leaned sadly, and
whispered to herself, "What shall I do?"

A sudden fog came on, and she curtailed her walk, passing under
the tree again on her return. Again he addressed her. "Grace,"
he said, when she was close to the trunk, "speak to me." She shook
her head without stopping, and went on to a little distance, where
she stood observing him from behind the hedge.

Her coldness had been kindly meant. If it was to be done, she had
said to herself, it should be begun at once. While she stood out
of observation Giles seemed to recognize her meaning; with a
sudden start he worked on, climbing higher, and cutting himself
off more and more from all intercourse with the sublunary world.
At last he had worked himself so high up the elm, and the mist had
so thickened, that he could only just be discerned as a dark-gray
spot on the light-gray sky: he would have been altogether out of
notice but for the stroke of his billhook and the flight of a
bough downward, and its crash upon the hedge at intervals.

It was not to be done thus, after all: plainness and candor were
best. She went back a third time; he did not see her now, and she
lingeringly gazed up at his unconscious figure, loath to put an
end to any kind of hope that might live on in him still. "Giles--
Mr. Winterborne," she said.

He was so high amid the fog that he did not hear. "Mr.
Winterborne!" she cried again, and this time he stopped, looked
down, and replied.

"My silence just now was not accident," she said, in an unequal
voice. "My father says it is best not to think too much of that--
engagement, or understanding between us, that you know of. I,
too, think that upon the whole he is right. But we are friends,
you know, Giles, and almost relations."

"Very well," he answered, as if without surprise, in a voice which
barely reached down the tree. "I have nothing to say in
objection--I cannot say anything till I've thought a while."

She added, with emotion in her tone, "For myself, I would have
married you--some day--I think. But I give way, for I see it
would be unwise."

He made no reply, but sat back upon a bough, placed his elbow in a
fork, and rested his head upon his hand. Thus he remained till
the fog and the night had completely enclosed him from her view.

Grace heaved a divided sigh, with a tense pause between, and moved
onward, her heart feeling uncomfortably big and heavy, and her
eyes wet. Had Giles, instead of remaining still, immediately come
down from the tree to her, would she have continued in that filial
acquiescent frame of mind which she had announced to him as final?
If it be true, as women themselves have declared, that one of
their sex is never so much inclined to throw in her lot with a man
for good and all as five minutes after she has told him such a
thing cannot be, the probabilities are that something might have
been done by the appearance of Winterborne on the ground beside
Grace. But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy
Niflheim or fog-land which involved him, and she proceeded on her
way.

The spot seemed now to be quite deserted. The light from South's
window made rays on the fog, but did not reach the tree. A
quarter of an hour passed, and all was blackness overhead. Giles
had not yet come down.

Then the tree seemed to shiver, then to heave a sigh; a movement
was audible, and Winterborne dropped almost noiselessly to the
ground. He had thought the matter out, and having returned the
ladder and billhook to their places, pursued his way homeward. He
would not allow this incident to affect his outer conduct any more
than the danger to his leaseholds had done, and went to bed as
usual. Two simultaneous troubles do not always make a double
trouble; and thus it came to pass that Giles's practical anxiety
about his houses, which would have been enough to keep him awake
half the night at any other time, was displaced and not reinforced
by his sentimental trouble about Grace Melbury. This severance
was in truth more like a burial of her than a rupture with her;
but he did not realize so much at present; even when he arose in
the morning he felt quite moody and stern: as yet the second note
in the gamut of such emotions, a tender regret for his loss, had
not made itself heard.

A load of oak timber was to be sent away that morning to a builder
whose works were in a town many miles off. The proud trunks were
taken up from the silent spot which had known them through the
buddings and sheddings of their growth for the foregoing hundred
years; chained down like slaves to a heavy timber carriage with
enormous red wheels, and four of the most powerful of Melbury's
horses were harnessed in front to draw them.

The horses wore their bells that day. There were sixteen to the
team, carried on a frame above each animal's shoulders, and tuned
to scale, so as to form two octaves, running from the highest note
on the right or off-side of the leader to the lowest on the left
or near-side of the shaft-horse. Melbury was among the last to
retain horse-bells in that neighborhood; for, living at Little
Hintock, where the lanes yet remained as narrow as before the days
of turnpike roads, these sound-signals were still as useful to him
and his neighbors as they had ever been in former times. Much
backing was saved in the course of a year by the warning notes
they cast ahead; moreover, the tones of all the teams in the
district being known to the carters of each, they could tell a
long way off on a dark night whether they were about to encounter
friends or strangers.

The fog of the previous evening still lingered so heavily over the
woods that the morning could not penetrate the trees till long
after its time. The load being a ponderous one, the lane crooked,
and the air so thick, Winterborne set out, as he often did, to
accompany the team as far as the corner, where it would turn into
a wider road.

So they rumbled on, shaking the foundations of the roadside
cottages by the weight of their progress, the sixteen bells
chiming harmoniously over all, till they had risen out of the
valley and were descending towards the more open route, the sparks
rising from their creaking skid and nearly setting fire to the
dead leaves alongside.

Then occurred one of the very incidents against which the bells
were an endeavor to guard. Suddenly there beamed into their eyes,
quite close to them, the two lamps of a carriage, shorn of rays by
the fog. Its approach had been quite unheard, by reason of their
own noise. The carriage was a covered one, while behind it could
be discerned another vehicle laden with luggage.

Winterborne went to the head of the team, and heard the coachman
telling the carter that he must turn back. The carter declared
that this was impossible.

"You can turn if you unhitch your string-horses," said the
coachman.

"It is much easier for you to turn than for us," said Winterborne.
"We've five tons of timber on these wheels if we've an ounce."

"But I've another carriage with luggage at my back."

Winterborne admitted the strength of the argument. "But even with
that," he said, "you can back better than we. And you ought to,
for you could hear our bells half a mile off."

"And you could see our lights."

"We couldn't, because of the fog."

"Well, our time's precious," said the coachman, haughtily. "You
are only going to some trumpery little village or other in the
neighborhood, while we are going straight to Italy."

"Driving all the way, I suppose," said Winterborne, sarcastically.

The argument continued in these terms till a voice from the
interior of the carriage inquired what was the matter. It was a
lady's.

She was briefly informed of the timber people's obstinacy; and
then Giles could hear her telling the footman to direct the timber
people to turn their horses' heads.

The message was brought, and Winterborne sent the bearer back to
say that he begged the lady's pardon, but that he could not do as
she requested; that though he would not assert it to be
impossible, it was impossible by comparison with the slight
difficulty to her party to back their light carriages. As fate
would have it, the incident with Grace Melbury on the previous day
made Giles less gentle than he might otherwise have shown himself,
his confidence in the sex being rudely shaken.

In fine, nothing could move him, and the carriages were compelled
to back till they reached one of the sidings or turnouts
constructed in the bank for the purpose. Then the team came on
ponderously, and the clanging of its sixteen bells as it passed
the discomfited carriages, tilted up against the bank, lent a
particularly triumphant tone to the team's progress--a tone which,
in point of fact, did not at all attach to its conductor's
feelings.

Giles walked behind the timber, and just as he had got past the
yet stationary carriages he heard a soft voice say, "Who is that
rude man? Not Melbury?" The sex of the speaker was so prominent in
the voice that Winterborne felt a pang of regret.

"No, ma'am. A younger man, in a smaller way of business in Little
Hintock. Winterborne is his name."

Thus they parted company. "Why, Mr. Winterborne," said the
wagoner, when they were out of hearing, "that was She--Mrs.
Charmond! Who'd ha' thought it? What in the world can a woman that
does nothing be cock-watching out here at this time o' day for?
Oh, going to Italy--yes to be sure, I heard she was going abroad,
she can't endure the winter here."

Winterborne was vexed at the incident; the more so that he knew
Mr. Melbury, in his adoration of Hintock House, would be the first
to blame him if it became known. But saying no more, he
accompanied the load to the end of the lane, and then turned back
with an intention to call at South's to learn the result of the
experiment of the preceding evening.

It chanced that a few minutes before this time Grace Melbury, who
now rose soon enough to breakfast with her father, in spite of the
unwontedness of the hour, had been commissioned by him to make the
same inquiry at South's. Marty had been standing at the door when
Miss Melbury arrived. Almost before the latter had spoken, Mrs.
Charmond's carriages, released from the obstruction up the lane,
came bowling along, and the two girls turned to regard the
spectacle.

Mrs. Charmond did not see them, but there was sufficient light for
them to discern her outline between the carriage windows. A
noticeable feature in her tournure was a magnificent mass of
braided locks.

"How well she looks this morning!" said Grace, forgetting Mrs.
Charmond's slight in her generous admiration. "Her hair so
becomes her worn that way. I have never seen any more beautiful!"

"Nor have I, miss," said Marty, dryly, unconsciously stroking her
crown.

Grace watched the carriages with lingering regret till they were
out of sight. She then learned of Marty that South was no better.
Before she had come away Winterborne approached the house, but
seeing that one of the two girls standing on the door-step was
Grace, he suddenly turned back again and sought the shelter of his
own home till she should have gone away.

CHAPTER XIV.

The encounter with the carriages having sprung upon Winterborne's
mind the image of Mrs. Charmond, his thoughts by a natural channel
went from her to the fact that several cottages and other houses
in the two Hintocks, now his own, would fall into her possession
in the event of South's death. He marvelled what people could
have been thinking about in the past to invent such precarious
tenures as these; still more, what could have induced his
ancestors at Hintock, and other village people, to exchange their
old copyholds for life-leases. But having naturally succeeded to
these properties through his father, he had done his best to keep
them in order, though he was much struck with his father's
negligence in not insuring South's life.

After breakfast, still musing on the circumstances, he went up-
stairs, turned over his bed, and drew out a flat canvas bag which
lay between the mattress and the sacking. In this he kept his
leases, which had remained there unopened ever since his father's
death. It was the usual hiding-place among rural lifeholders for
such documents. Winterborne sat down on the bed and looked them
over. They were ordinary leases for three lives, which a member
of the South family, some fifty years before this time, had
accepted of the lord of the manor in lieu of certain copyholds and
other rights, in consideration of having the dilapidated houses
rebuilt by said lord. They had come into his father's possession
chiefly through his mother, who was a South.

Pinned to the parchment of one of the indentures was a letter,
which Winterborne had never seen before. It bore a remote date,
the handwriting being that of some solicitor or agent, and the
signature the landholder's. It was to the effect that at any time
before the last of the stated lives should drop, Mr. Giles
Winterborne, senior, or his representative, should have the
privilege of adding his own and his son's life to the life
remaining on payment of a merely nominal sum; the concession being
in consequence of the elder Winterborne's consent to demolish one
of the houses and relinquish its site, which stood at an awkward
corner of the lane and impeded the way.

The house had been pulled down years before. Why Giles's father
had not taken advantage of his privilege to insert his own and his
son's lives it was impossible to say. The likelihood was that
death alone had hindered him in the execution of his project, as
it surely was, the elder Winterborne having been a man who took
much pleasure in dealing with house property in his small way.

Since one of the Souths still survived, there was not much doubt
that Giles could do what his father had left undone, as far as his
own life was concerned. This possibility cheered him much, for by
those houses hung many things. Melbury's doubt of the young man's
fitness to be the husband of Grace had been based not a little on
the precariousness of his holdings in Little and Great Hintock.
He resolved to attend to the business at once, the fine for
renewal being a sum that he could easily muster. His scheme,
however, could not be carried out in a day; and meanwhile he would
run up to South's, as he had intended to do, to learn the result
of the experiment with the tree.

Marty met him at the door. "Well, Marty," he said; and was
surprised to read in her face that the case was not so hopeful as
he had imagined.

"I am sorry for your labor," she said. "It is all lost. He says
the tree seems taller than ever."

Winterborne looked round at it. Taller the tree certainly did
seem, the gauntness of its now naked stem being more marked than
before.

"It quite terrified him when he first saw what you had done to it
this morning," she added. "He declares it will come down upon us
and cleave us, like 'the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.'"

"Well; can I do anything else?" asked he.

"The doctor says the tree ought to be cut down."

"Oh--you've had the doctor?"

"I didn't send for him Mrs. Charmond, before she left, heard that
father was ill, and told him to attend him at her expense."

"That was very good of her. And he says it ought to be cut down.
We mustn't cut it down without her knowledge, I suppose."

He went up-stairs. There the old man sat, staring at the now
gaunt tree as if his gaze were frozen on to its trunk. Unluckily
the tree waved afresh by this time, a wind having sprung up and
blown the fog away, and his eyes turned with its wavings.

They heard footsteps--a man's, but of a lighter type than usual.
"There is Doctor Fitzpiers again," she said, and descended.
Presently his tread was heard on the naked stairs.

Mr. Fitzpiers entered the sick-chamber just as a doctor is more or
less wont to do on such occasions, and pre-eminently when the room
is that of a humble cottager, looking round towards the patient
with that preoccupied gaze which so plainly reveals that he has
wellnigh forgotten all about the case and the whole circumstances
since he dismissed them from his mind at his last exit from the
same apartment. He nodded to Winterborne, with whom he was
already a little acquainted, recalled the case to his thoughts,
and went leisurely on to where South sat.

Fitzpiers was, on the whole, a finely formed, handsome man. His
eyes were dark and impressive, and beamed with the light either of
energy or of susceptivity--it was difficult to say which; it might
have been a little of both. That quick, glittering, practical
eye, sharp for the surface of things and for nothing beneath it,
he had not. But whether his apparent depth of vision was real, or
only an artistic accident of his corporeal moulding, nothing but
his deeds could reveal.

His face was rather soft than stern, charming than grand, pale
than flushed; his nose--if a sketch of his features be de rigueur
for a person of his pretensions--was artistically beautiful enough
to have been worth doing in marble by any sculptor not over-busy,
and was hence devoid of those knotty irregularities which often
mean power; while the double-cyma or classical curve of his mouth
was not without a looseness in its close. Nevertheless, either
from his readily appreciative mien, or his reflective manner, or
the instinct towards profound things which was said to possess
him, his presence bespoke the philosopher rather than the dandy or
macaroni--an effect which was helped by the absence of trinkets or
other trivialities from his attire, though this was more finished
and up to date than is usually the case among rural practitioners.

Strict people of the highly respectable class, knowing a little
about him by report, might have said that he seemed likely to err
rather in the possession of too many ideas than too few; to be a
dreamy 'ist of some sort, or too deeply steeped in some false kind
of 'ism. However this may be, it will be seen that he was
undoubtedly a somewhat rare kind of gentleman and doctor to have
descended, as from the clouds, upon Little Hintock.

"This is an extraordinary case," he said at last to Winterborne,
after examining South by conversation, look, and touch, and
learning that the craze about the elm was stronger than ever.
"Come down-stairs, and I'll tell you what I think."

They accordingly descended, and the doctor continued, "The tree
must be cut down, or I won't answer for his life."

"'Tis Mrs. Charmond's tree, and I suppose we must get permission?"
said Giles. "If so, as she is gone away, I must speak to her
agent."

"Oh--never mind whose tree it is--what's a tree beside a life! Cut
it down. I have not the honor of knowing Mrs. Charmond as yet,
but I am disposed to risk that much with her."

"'Tis timber," rejoined Giles, more scrupulous than he would have
been had not his own interests stood so closely involved.
"They'll never fell a stick about here without it being marked
first, either by her or the agent."

"Then we'll inaugurate a new era forthwith. How long has he
complained of the tree?" asked the doctor of Marty.

"Weeks and weeks, sir. The shape of it seems to haunt him like an
evil spirit. He says that it is exactly his own age, that it has
got human sense, and sprouted up when he was born on purpose to
rule him, and keep him as its slave. Others have been like it
afore in Hintock."

They could hear South's voice up-stairs "Oh, he's rocking this
way; he must come! And then my poor life, that's worth houses upon
houses, will be squashed out o' me. Oh! oh!"

"That's how he goes on," she added. "And he'll never look
anywhere else but out of the window, and scarcely have the
curtains drawn."

"Down with it, then, and hang Mrs. Charmond," said Mr. Fitzpiers.
"The best plan will be to wait till the evening, when it is dark,
or early in the morning before he is awake, so that he doesn't see
it fall, for that would terrify him worse than ever. Keep the
blind down till I come, and then I'll assure him, and show him
that his trouble is over."

The doctor then departed, and they waited till the evening. When
it was dusk, and the curtains drawn, Winterborne directed a couple
of woodmen to bring a crosscut-saw, and the tall, threatening tree
was soon nearly off at its base. He would not fell it completely
then, on account of the possible crash, but next morning, before
South was awake, they went and lowered it cautiously, in a
direction away from the cottage. It was a business difficult to
do quite silently; but it was done at last, and the elm of the
same birth-year as the woodman's lay stretched upon the ground.
The weakest idler that passed could now set foot on marks formerly
made in the upper forks by the shoes of adventurous climbers only;
once inaccessible nests could be examined microscopically; and on
swaying extremities where birds alone had perched, the by-standers
sat down.

As soon as it was broad daylight the doctor came, and Winterborne
entered the house with him. Marty said that her father was
wrapped up and ready, as usual, to be put into his chair. They
ascended the stairs, and soon seated him. He began at once to
complain of the tree, and the danger to his life and Winterborne's
house-property in consequence.

The doctor signalled to Giles, who went and drew back the printed
cotton curtains. "'Tis gone, see," said Mr. Fitzpiers.

As soon as the old man saw the vacant patch of sky in place of the
branched column so familiar to his gaze, he sprang up, speechless,
his eyes rose from their hollows till the whites showed all round;
he fell back, and a bluish whiteness overspread him.

Greatly alarmed, they put him on the bed. As soon as he came a
little out of his fit, he gasped, "Oh, it is gone!--where?--
where?"

His whole system seemed paralyzed by amazement. They were
thunder-struck at the result of the experiment, and did all they
could. Nothing seemed to avail. Giles and Fitzpiers went and
came, but uselessly. He lingered through the day, and died that
evening as the sun went down.

"D--d if my remedy hasn't killed him!" murmured the doctor.

CHAPTER XV.

When Melbury heard what had happened he seemed much moved, and
walked thoughtfully about the premises. On South's own account he
was genuinely sorry; and on Winterborne's he was the more grieved
in that this catastrophe had so closely followed the somewhat
harsh dismissal of Giles as the betrothed of his daughter.

He was quite angry with circumstances for so heedlessly inflicting
on Giles a second trouble when the needful one inflicted by
himself was all that the proper order of events demanded. "I told
Giles's father when he came into those houses not to spend too
much money on lifehold property held neither for his own life nor
his son's," he exclaimed. "But he wouldn't listen to me. And now
Giles has to suffer for it."

"Poor Giles!" murmured Grace.

"Now, Grace, between us two, it is very, very remarkable. It is
almost as if I had foreseen this; and I am thankful for your
escape, though I am sincerely sorry for Giles. Had we not
dismissed him already, we could hardly have found it in our hearts
to dismiss him now. So I say, be thankful. I'll do all I can for
him as a friend; but as a pretender to the position of my son-in
law, that can never be thought of more."

And yet at that very moment the impracticability to which poor
Winterborne's suit had been reduced was touching Grace's heart to
a warmer sentiment on his behalf than she had felt for years
concerning him.

He, meanwhile, was sitting down alone in the old familiar house
which had ceased to be his, taking a calm if somewhat dismal
survey of affairs. The pendulum of the clock bumped every now and
then against one side of the case in which it swung, as the
muffled drum to his worldly march. Looking out of the window he
could perceive that a paralysis had come over Creedle's occupation
of manuring the garden, owing, obviously, to a conviction that
they might not be living there long enough to profit by next
season's crop.

He looked at the leases again and the letter attached. There was
no doubt that he had lost his houses by an accident which might
easily have been circumvented if he had known the true conditions
of his holding. The time for performance had now lapsed in strict
law; but might not the intention be considered by the landholder
when she became aware of the circumstances, and his moral right to
retain the holdings for the term of his life be conceded?

His heart sank within him when he perceived that despite all the
legal reciprocities and safeguards prepared and written, the
upshot of the matter amounted to this, that it depended upon the
mere caprice--good or ill--of the woman he had met the day before
in such an unfortunate way, whether he was to possess his houses
for life or no.

While he was sitting and thinking a step came to the door, and
Melbury appeared, looking very sorry for his position.
Winterborne welcomed him by a word and a look, and went on with
his examination of the parchments. His visitor sat down.

"Giles," he said, "this is very awkward, and I am sorry for it.
What are you going to do?"

Giles informed him of the real state of affairs, and how barely he
had missed availing himself of his chance of renewal.

"What a misfortune! Why was this neglected? Well, the best thing
you can do is to write and tell her all about it, and throw
yourself upon her generosity."

"I would rather not," murmured Giles.

"But you must," said Melbury.

In short, he argued so cogently that Giles allowed himself to be
persuaded, and the letter to Mrs. Charmond was written and sent to
Hintock House, whence, as he knew, it would at once be forwarded
to her.

Melbury feeling that he had done so good an action in coming as
almost to extenuate his previous arbitrary conduct to nothing,
went home; and Giles was left alone to the suspense of waiting for
a reply from the divinity who shaped the ends of the Hintock
population. By this time all the villagers knew of the
circumstances, and being wellnigh like one family, a keen interest
was the result all round.

Everybody thought of Giles; nobody thought of Marty. Had any of
them looked in upon her during those moonlight nights which
preceded the burial of her father, they would have seen the girl
absolutely alone in the house with the dead man. Her own chamber
being nearest the stairs, the coffin had been placed there for
convenience; and at a certain hour of the night, when the moon
arrived opposite the window, its beams streamed across the still
profile of South, sublimed by the august presence of death, and
onward a few feet farther upon the face of his daughter, lying in
her little bed in the stillness of a repose almost as dignified as
that of her companion--the repose of a guileless soul that had
nothing more left on earth to lose, except a life which she did
not overvalue.

South was buried, and a week passed, and Winterborne watched for a
reply from Mrs. Charmond. Melbury was very sanguine as to its
tenor; but Winterborne had not told him of the encounter with her
carriage, when, if ever he had heard an affronted tone on a
woman's lips, he had heard it on hers.

The postman's time for passing was just after Melbury's men had
assembled in the spar-house; and Winterborne, who when not busy on
his own account would lend assistance there, used to go out into
the lane every morning and meet the post-man at the end of one of
the green rides through the hazel copse, in the straight stretch
of which his laden figure could be seen a long way off. Grace
also was very anxious; more anxious than her father; more,
perhaps, than Winterborne himself. This anxiety led her into the
spar-house on some pretext or other almost every morning while
they were awaiting the reply.

Fitzpiers too, though he did not personally appear, was much
interested, and not altogether easy in his mind; for he had been
informed by an authority of what he had himself conjectured, that
if the tree had been allowed to stand, the old man would have gone
on complaining, but might have lived for twenty years.

Eleven times had Winterborne gone to that corner of the ride, and
looked up its long straight slope through the wet grays of winter
dawn. But though the postman's bowed figure loomed in view pretty
regularly, he brought nothing for Giles. On the twelfth day the
man of missives, while yet in the extreme distance, held up his
hand, and Winterborne saw a letter in it. He took it into the
spar-house before he broke the seal, and those who were there
gathered round him while he read, Grace looking in at the door.

The letter was not from Mrs. Charmond herself, but her agent at
Sherton. Winterborne glanced it over and looked up.

"It's all over," he said.

"Ah!" said they altogether.

"Her lawyer is instructed to say that Mrs. Charmond sees no reason
for disturbing the natural course of things, particularly as she
contemplates pulling the houses down," he said, quietly.

"Only think of that!" said several.

Winterborne had turned away, and said vehemently to himself, "Then
let her pull 'em down, and be d--d to her!"

Creedle looked at him with a face of seven sorrows, saying, "Ah,
'twas that sperrit that lost 'em for ye, maister!"

Winterborne subdued his feelings, and from that hour, whatever
they were, kept them entirely to himself. There could be no doubt
that, up to this last moment, he had nourished a feeble hope of
regaining Grace in the event of this negotiation turning out a
success. Not being aware of the fact that her father could have
settled upon her a fortune sufficient to enable both to live in
comfort, he deemed it now an absurdity to dream any longer of such
a vanity as making her his wife, and sank into silence forthwith.

Yet whatever the value of taciturnity to a man among strangers, it
is apt to express more than talkativeness when he dwells among
friends. The countryman who is obliged to judge the time of day
from changes in external nature sees a thousand successive tints
and traits in the landscape which are never discerned by him who
hears the regular chime of a clock, because they are never in
request. In like manner do we use our eyes on our taciturn
comrade. The infinitesimal movement of muscle, curve, hair, and
wrinkle, which when accompanied by a voice goes unregarded, is
watched and translated in the lack of it, till virtually the whole
surrounding circle of familiars is charged with the reserved one's
moods and meanings.

This was the condition of affairs between Winterborne and his
neighbors after his stroke of ill-luck. He held his tongue; and
they observed him, and knew that he was discomposed.

Mr. Melbury, in his compunction, thought more of the matter than
any one else, except his daughter. Had Winterborne been going on
in the old fashion, Grace's father could have alluded to his
disapproval of the alliance every day with the greatest frankness;
but to speak any further on the subject he could not find it in
his heart to do now. He hoped that Giles would of his own accord
make some final announcement that he entirely withdrew his
pretensions to Grace, and so get the thing past and done with.
For though Giles had in a measure acquiesced in the wish of her
family, he could make matters unpleasant if he chose to work upon
Grace; and hence, when Melbury saw the young man approaching along
the road one day, he kept friendliness and frigidity exactly
balanced in his eye till he could see whether Giles's manner was
presumptive or not.

His manner was that of a man who abandoned all claims. "I am glad
to meet ye, Mr. Melbury," he said, in a low voice, whose quality
he endeavored to make as practical as possible. "I am afraid I
shall not be able to keep that mare I bought, and as I don't care
to sell her, I should like--if you don't object--to give her to
Miss Melbury. The horse is very quiet, and would be quite safe
for her."

Mr. Melbury was rather affected at this. "You sha'n't hurt your
pocket like that on our account, Giles. Grace shall have the
horse, but I'll pay you what you gave for her, and any expense you
may have been put to for her keep."

He would not hear of any other terms, and thus it was arranged.
They were now opposite Melbury's house, and the timber-merchant
pressed Winterborne to enter, Grace being out of the way.

"Pull round the settle, Giles," said the timber-merchant, as soon
as they were within. "I should like to have a serious talk with
you."

Thereupon he put the case to Winterborne frankly, and in quite a
friendly way. He declared that he did not like to be hard on a
man when he was in difficulty; but he really did not see how
Winterborne could marry his daughter now, without even a house to
take her to.

Giles quite acquiesced in the awkwardness of his situation. But
from a momentary feeling that he would like to know Grace's mind
from her own lips, he did not speak out positively there and then.
He accordingly departed somewhat abruptly, and went home to
consider whether he would seek to bring about a meeting with her.

In the evening, while he sat quietly pondering, he fancied that he
heard a scraping on the wall outside his house. The boughs of a
monthly rose which grew there made such a noise sometimes, but as
no wind was stirring he knew that it could not be the rose-tree.
He took up the candle and went out. Nobody was near. As he
turned, the light flickered on the whitewashed rough case of the
front, and he saw words written thereon in charcoal, which he read
as follows:

    "O Giles, you've lost your dwelling-place,
     And therefore, Giles, you'll lose your Grace."

Giles went in-doors. He had his suspicions as to the scrawler of
those lines, but he could not be sure. What suddenly filled his
heart far more than curiosity about their authorship was a
terrible belief that they were turning out to be true, try to see
Grace as he might. They decided the question for him. He sat
down and wrote a formal note to Melbury, in which he briefly
stated that he was placed in such a position as to make him share
to the full Melbury's view of his own and his daughter's promise,
made some years before; to wish that it should be considered as
cancelled, and they themselves quite released from any obligation
on account of it.

Having fastened up this their plenary absolution, he determined to
get it out of his hands and have done with it; to which end he
went off to Melbury's at once. It was now so late that the family
had all retired;  he crept up to the house, thrust the note under
the door, and stole away as silently as he had come.

Melbury himself was the first to rise the next morning, and when
he had read the letter his relief was great. "Very honorable of
Giles, very honorable," he kept saying to himself. "I shall not
forget him. Now to keep her up to her own true level."

It happened that Grace went out for an early ramble that morning,
passing through the door and gate while her father was in the
spar-house. To go in her customary direction she could not avoid
passing Winterborne's house. The morning sun was shining flat
upon its white surface, and the words, which still remained, were
immediately visible to her. She read them. Her face flushed to
crimson. She could see Giles and Creedle talking together at the
back; the charred spar-gad with which the lines had been written
lay on the ground beneath the wall. Feeling pretty sure that
Winterborne would observe her action, she quickly went up to the
wall, rubbed out "lose" and inserted "keep" in its stead. Then
she made the best of her way home without looking behind her.
Giles could draw an inference now if he chose.

There could not be the least doubt that gentle Grace was warming
to more sympathy with, and interest in, Giles Winterborne than
ever she had done while he was her promised lover; that since his
misfortune those social shortcomings of his, which contrasted so
awkwardly with her later experiences of life, had become obscured
by the generous revival of an old romantic attachment to him.
Though mentally trained and tilled into foreignness of view, as
compared with her youthful time, Grace was not an ambitious girl,
and might, if left to herself, have declined Winterborne without
much discontent or unhappiness. Her feelings just now were so far
from latent that the writing on the wall had thus quickened her to
an unusual rashness.

Having returned from her walk she sat at breakfast silently. When
her step-mother had left the room she said to her father, "I have
made up my mind that I should like my engagement to Giles to
continue, for the present at any rate, till I can see further what
I ought to do."

Melbury looked much surprised.

"Nonsense," he said, sharply. "You don't know what you are
talking about. Look here."

He handed across to her the letter received from Giles.

She read it, and said no more. Could he have seen her write on
the wall? She did not know. Fate, it seemed, would have it this
way, and there was nothing to do but to acquiesce.

It was a few hours after this that Winterborne, who, curiously
enough, had NOT perceived Grace writing, was clearing away the
tree from the front of South's late dwelling. He saw Marty
standing in her door-way, a slim figure in meagre black, almost
without womanly contours as yet. He went up to her and said,
"Marty, why did you write that on my wall last night? It WAS you,
you know."

"Because it was the truth. I didn't mean to let it stay, Mr.
Winterborne; but when I was going to rub it out you came, and I
was obliged to run off."

"Having prophesied one thing, why did you alter it to another?
Your predictions can't be worth much."

"I have not altered it."

"But you have."

"No."

"It is altered. Go and see."

She went, and read that, in spite of losing his dwelling-place, he
would KEEP his Grace. Marty came back surprised.

"Well, I never," she said. "Who can have made such nonsense of
it?"

"Who, indeed?" said he.

"I have rubbed it all out, as the point of it is quite gone."

"You'd no business to rub it out. I didn't tell you to. I meant
to let it stay a little longer."

"Some idle boy did it, no doubt," she murmured.

As this seemed very probable, and the actual perpetrator was
unsuspected, Winterborne said no more, and dismissed the matter
from his mind.

From this day of his life onward for a considerable time,
Winterborne, though not absolutely out of his house as yet,
retired into the background of human life and action thereabout--a
feat not particularly difficult of performance anywhere when the
doer has the assistance of a lost prestige. Grace, thinking that
Winterborne saw her write, made no further sign, and the frail
bark of fidelity that she had thus timidly launched was stranded
and lost.

CHAPTER XVI.

Dr. Fitzpiers lived on the slope of the hill, in a house of much
less pretension, both as to architecture and as to magnitude, than
the timber-merchant's. The latter had, without doubt, been once
the manorial residence appertaining to the snug and modest domain
of Little Hintock, of which the boundaries were now lost by its
absorption with others of its kind into the adjoining estate of
Mrs. Charmond. Though the Melburys themselves were unaware of the
fact, there was every reason to believe--at least so the parson
said that the owners of that little manor had been Melbury's own
ancestors, the family name occurring in numerous documents
relating to transfers of land about the time of the civil wars.

Mr. Fitzpiers's dwelling, on the contrary, was small, cottage-
like, and comparatively modern. It had been occupied, and was in
part occupied still, by a retired farmer and his wife, who, on the
surgeon's arrival in quest of a home, had accommodated him by
receding from their front rooms into the kitchen quarter, whence
they administered to his wants, and emerged at regular intervals
to receive from him a not unwelcome addition to their income.

The cottage and its garden were so regular in their arrangement
that they might have been laid out by a Dutch designer of the time
of William and Mary. In a low, dense hedge, cut to wedge-shape,
was a door over which the hedge formed an arch, and from the
inside of the door a straight path, bordered with clipped box, ran
up the slope of the garden to the porch, which was exactly in the
middle of the house front, with two windows on each side. Right
and left of the path were first a bed of gooseberry bushes; next
of currant; next of raspberry; next of strawberry; next of old-
fashioned flowers; at the corners opposite the porch being spheres
of box resembling a pair of school globes. Over the roof of the
house could be seen the orchard, on yet higher ground, and behind
the orchard the forest-trees, reaching up to the crest of the
hill.

Opposite the garden door and visible from the parlor window was a
swing-gate leading into a field, across which there ran a foot-
path. The swing-gate had just been repainted, and on one fine
afternoon, before the paint was dry, and while gnats were still
dying thereon, the surgeon was standing in his sitting-room
abstractedly looking out at the different pedestrians who passed
and repassed along that route. Being of a philosophical stamp, he
perceived that the chararter of each of these travellers exhibited
itself in a somewhat amusing manner by his or her method of
handling the gate.

As regarded the men, there was not much variety: they gave the
gate a kick and passed through. The women were more contrasting.
To them the sticky wood-work was a barricade, a disgust, a menace,
a treachery, as the case might be.

The first that he noticed was a bouncing woman with her skirts
tucked up and her hair uncombed. She grasped the gate without
looking, giving it a supplementary push with her shoulder, when
the white imprint drew from her an exclamation in language not too
refined. She went to the green bank, sat down and rubbed herself
in the grass, cursing the while.

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the doctor.

The next was a girl, with her hair cropped short, in whom the
surgeon recognized the daughter of his late patient, the woodman
South. Moreover, a black bonnet that she wore by way of mourning
unpleasantly reminded him that he had ordered the felling of a
tree which had caused her parent's death and Winterborne's losses.
She walked and thought, and not recklessly; but her preoccupation
led her to grasp unsuspectingly the bar of the gate, and touch it
with her arm. Fitzpiers felt sorry that she should have soiled
that new black frock, poor as it was, for it was probably her only
one. She looked at her hand and arm, seemed but little surprised,
wiped off the disfigurement with an almost unmoved face, and as if
without abandoning her original thoughts. Thus she went on her
way.

Then there came over the green quite a different sort of
personage. She walked as delicately as if she had been bred in
town, and as firmly as if she had been bred in the country; she
seemed one who dimly knew her appearance to be attractive, but who
retained some of the charm of being ignorant of that fact by
forgetting it in a general pensiveness. She approached the gate.
To let such a creature touch it even with a tip of her glove was
to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to tragical self-
destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, but was unable
to find the right one; glancing again out of the window he saw
that he was too late. Having come up, she stopped, looked at the
gate, picked up a little stick, and using it as a bayonet, pushed
open the obstacle without touching it at all.

He steadily watched her till she had passed out of sight,
recognizing her as the very young lady whom he had seen once
before and been unable to identify. Whose could that emotional
face be? All the others he had seen in Hintock as yet oppressed
him with their crude rusticity; the contrast offered by this
suggested that she hailed from elsewhere.

Precisely these thoughts had occurred to him at the first time of
seeing her; but he now went a little further with them, and
considered that as there had been no carriage seen or heard lately
in that spot she could not have come a very long distance. She
must be somebody staying at Hintock House? Possibly Mrs. Charmond,
of whom he had heard so much--at any rate an inmate, and this
probability was sufficient to set a mild radiance in the surgeon's
somewhat dull sky.

Fitzpiers sat down to the book he had been perusing. It happened
to be that of a German metaphysician, for the doctor was not a
practical man, except by fits, and much preferred the ideal world
to the real, and the discovery of principles to their application.
The young lady remained in his thoughts. He might have followed
her; but he was not constitutionally active, and preferred a
conjectural pursuit. However, when he went out for a ramble just
before dusk he insensibly took the direction of Hintock House,
which was the way that Grace had been walking, it having happened
that her mind had run on Mrs. Charmond that day, and she had
walked to the brow of a hill whence the house could be seen,
returning by another route.

Fitzpiers in his turn reached the edge of the glen, overlooking
the manor-house. The shutters were shut, and only one chimney
smoked. The mere aspect of the place was enough to inform him
that Mrs. Charmond had gone away and that nobody else was staying
there. Fitzpiers felt a vague disappointment that the young lady
was not Mrs. Charmond, of whom he had heard so much; and without
pausing longer to gaze at a carcass from which the spirit had
flown, he bent his steps homeward.

Later in the evening Fitzpiers was summoned to visit a cottage
patient about two miles distant. Like the majority of young
practitioners in his position he was far from having assumed the
dignity of being driven his rounds by a servant in a brougham that
flashed the sunlight like a mirror; his way of getting about was
by means of a gig which he drove himself, hitching the rein of the
horse to the gate post, shutter hook, or garden paling of the
domicile under visitation, or giving pennies to little boys to
hold the animal during his stay--pennies which were well earned
when the cases to be attended were of a certain cheerful kind that
wore out the patience of the little boys.

On this account of travelling alone, the night journeys which
Fitzpiers had frequently to take were dismal enough, a serious
apparent perversity in nature ruling that whenever there was to be
a birth in a particularly inaccessible and lonely place, that
event should occur in the night. The surgeon, having been of late
years a town man, hated the solitary midnight woodland. He was
not altogether skilful with the reins, and it often occurred to
his mind that if in some remote depths of the trees an accident
were to happen, the fact of his being alone might be the death of
him. Hence he made a practice of picking up any countryman or lad
whom he chanced to pass by, and under the disguise of treating him
to a nice drive, obtained his companionship on the journey, and
his convenient assistance in opening gates.

The doctor had started on his way out of the village on the night
in question when the light of his lamps fell upon the musing form
of Winterborne, walking leisurely along, as if he had no object in
life. Winterborne was a better class of companion than the doctor
usually could get, and he at once pulled up and asked him if he
would like a drive through the wood that fine night.

Giles seemed rather surprised at the doctor's friendliness, but
said that he had no objection, and accordingly mounted beside Mr.
Fitzpiers.

They drove along under the black boughs which formed a network
upon the stars, all the trees of a species alike in one respect,
and no two of them alike in another. Looking up as they passed
under a horizontal bough they sometimes saw objects like large
tadpoles lodged diametrically across it, which Giles explained to
be pheasants there at roost; and they sometimes heard the report
of a gun, which reminded him that others knew what those tadpole
shapes represented as well as he.

Presently the doctor said what he had been going to say for some
time:

"Is there a young lady staying in this neighborhood--a very
attractive girl--with a little white boa round her neck, and white
fur round her gloves?"

Winterborne of course knew in a moment that Grace, whom he had
caught the doctor peering at, was represented by these
accessaries. With a wary grimness, partly in his character,
partly induced by the circumstances, he evaded an answer by
saying, "I saw a young lady talking to Mrs. Charmond the other
day; perhaps it was she."

Fitzpiers concluded from this that Winterborne had not seen him
looking over the hedge. "It might have been," he said. "She is
quite a gentlewoman--the one I mean. She cannot be a permanent
resident in Hintock or I should have seen her before. Nor does
she look like one."

"She is not staying at Hintock House?"

"No; it is closed."

"Then perhaps she is staying at one of the cottages, or farm-
houses?"

"Oh no--you mistake. She was a different sort of girl
altogether." As Giles was nobody, Fitzpiers treated him
accordingly, and apostrophized the night in continuation:

  "'She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness,
    A power, that from its objects scarcely drew
    One impulse of her being--in her lightness
    Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew,
    Which wanders through the waste air's pathless blue,
    To nourish some far desert: she did seem
    Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew,
    Like the bright shade of some immortal dream
    Which walks, when tempests sleep, the wave of life's dark
stream.'"

The consummate charm of the lines seemed to Winterborne, though he
divined that they were a quotation, to be somehow the result of
his lost love's charms upon Fitzpiers.

"You seem to be mightily in love with her, sir," he said, with a
sensation of heart-sickness, and more than ever resolved not to
mention Grace by name.

"Oh no--I am not that, Winterborne; people living insulated, as I
do by the solitude of this place, get charged with emotive fluid
like a Leyden-jar with electric, for want of some conductor at
hand to disperse it. Human love is a subjective thing--the
essence itself of man, as that great thinker Spinoza the
philosopher says--ipsa hominis essentia--it is joy accompanied by
an idea which we project against any suitable object in the line
of our vision, just as the rainbow iris is projected against an
oak, ash, or elm tree indifferently. So that if any other young
lady had appeared instead of the one who did appear, I should have
felt just the same interest in her, and have quoted precisely the
same lines from Shelley about her, as about this one I saw. Such
miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!"

"Well, it is what we call being in love down in these parts,
whether or no," said Winterborne.

"You are right enough if you admit that I am in love with
something in my own head, and no thing in itself outside it at
all."

"Is it part of a country doctor's duties to learn that view of
things, may I ask, sir?" said Winterborne, adopting the Socratic
{Greek word: irony} with such well-assumed simplicity that
Fitzpiers answered, readily,

"Oh no. The real truth is, Winterborne, that medical practice in
places like this is a very rule-of-thumb matter; a bottle of
bitter stuff for this and that old woman--the bitterer the better--
compounded from a few simple stereotyped prescriptions;
occasional attendance at births, where mere presence is almost
sufficient, so healthy and strong are the people; and a lance for
an abscess now and then. Investigation and experiment cannot be
carried on without more appliances than one has here--though I
have attempted it a little."

Giles did not enter into this view of the case; what he had been
struck with was the curious parallelism between Mr. Fitzpiers's
manner and Grace's, as shown by the fact of both of them straying
into a subject of discourse so engrossing to themselves that it
made them forget it was foreign to him.

Nothing further passed between himself and the doctor in relation
to Grace till they were on their way back. They had stopped at a
way-side inn for a glass of brandy and cider hot, and when they
were again in motion, Fitzpiers, possibly a little warmed by the
liquor, resumed the subject by saying, "I should like very much to
know who that young lady was."

"What difference can it make, if she's only the tree your rainbow
falls on?"

"Ha! ha! True."

"You have no wife, sir?"

"I have no wife, and no idea of one. I hope to do better things
than marry and settle in Hintock. Not but that it is well for a
medical man to be married, and sometimes, begad, 'twould be
pleasant enough in this place, with the wind roaring round the
house, and the rain and the boughs beating against it. I hear
that you lost your life-holds by the death of South?"

"I did. I lost in more ways than one."

They had reached the top of Hintock Lane or Street, if it could be
called such where three-quarters of the road-side consisted of
copse and orchard. One of the first houses to be passed was
Melbury's. A light was shining from a bedroom window facing
lengthwise of the lane. Winterborne glanced at it, and saw what
was coming. He had withheld an answer to the doctor's inquiry to
hinder his knowledge of Grace; but, as he thought to himself, "who
hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in
a garment?" he could not hinder what was doomed to arrive, and
might just as well have been outspoken. As they came up to the
house, Grace's figure was distinctly visible, drawing the two
white curtains together which were used here instead of blinds.

"Why, there she is!" said Fitzpiers. "How does she come there?"

"In the most natural way in the world. It is her home. Mr.
Melbury is her father."

"Oh, indeed--indeed--indeed! How comes he to have a daughter of
that stamp?"

Winterborne laughed coldly. "Won't money do anything," he said,
"if you've promising material to work upon? Why shouldn't a
Hintock girl, taken early from home, and put under proper
instruction, become as finished as any other young lady, if she's
got brains and good looks to begin with?"

"No reason at all why she shouldn't," murmured the surgeon, with
reflective disappointment. "Only I didn't anticipate quite that
kind of origin for her."

"And you think an inch or two less of her now." There was a little
tremor in Winterborne's voice as he spoke.

"Well," said the doctor, with recovered warmth, "I am not so sure
that I think less of her. At first it was a sort of blow; but,
dammy! I'll stick up for her. She's charming, every inch of her!"

"So she is," said Winterborne, "but not to me."

From this ambiguous expression of the reticent woodlander's, Dr.
Fitzpiers inferred that Giles disliked Miss Melbury because of
some haughtiness in her bearing towards him, and had, on that
account, withheld her name. The supposition did not tend to
diminish his admiration for her.

CHAPTER XVII.

Grace's exhibition of herself, in the act of pulling-to the
window-curtains, had been the result of an unfortunate incident in
the house that day--nothing less than the illness of Grammer
Oliver, a woman who had never till now lain down for such a reason
in her life. Like others to whom unbroken years of health has
made the idea of keeping their bed almost as repugnant as death
itself, she had continued on foot till she literally fell on the
floor; and though she had, as yet, been scarcely a day off duty,
she had sickened into quite a different personage from the
independent Grammer of the yard and spar-house. Ill as she was,
on one point she was firm. On no account would she see a doctor;
in other words, Fitzpiers.

The room in which Grace had been discerned was not her own, but
the old woman's. On the girl's way to bed she had received a
message from Grammer, to the effect that she would much like to
speak to her that night.

Grace entered, and set the candle on a low chair beside the bed,
so that the profile of Grammer as she lay cast itself in a keen
shadow upon the whitened wall, her large head being still further
magnified by an enormous turban, which was, really, her petticoat
wound in a wreath round her temples. Grace put the room a little
in order, and approaching the sick woman, said, "I am come,
Grammer, as you wish. Do let us send for the doctor before it
gets later."

"I will not have him," said Grammer Oliver, decisively.

"Then somebody to sit up with you."

"Can't abear it! No; I wanted to see you, Miss Grace, because 'ch
have something on my mind. Dear Miss Grace, I TOOK THAT MONEY OF
THE DOCTOR, AFTER ALL!"

"What money?"

"The ten pounds."

Grace did not quite understand.

"The ten pounds he offered me for my head, because I've a large
brain. I signed a paper when I took the money, not feeling
concerned about it at all. I have not liked to tell ye that it
was really settled with him, because you showed such horror at the
notion. Well, having thought it over more at length, I wish I
hadn't done it; and it weighs upon my mind. John South's death of
fear about the tree makes me think that I shall die of this....'Ch
have been going to ask him again to let me off, but I hadn't the
face."

"Why?"

"I've spent some of the money--more'n two pounds o't. It do
wherrit me terribly; and I shall die o' the thought of that paper
I signed with my holy cross, as South died of his trouble."

"If you ask him to burn the paper he will, I'm sure, and think no
more of it."

"'Ch have done it once already, miss. But he laughed cruel like.
'Yours is such a fine brain, Grammer, 'er said, 'that science
couldn't afford to lose you. Besides, you've taken my
money.'...Don't let your father know of this, please, on no
account whatever!"

"No, no. I will let you have the money to return to him."

Grammer rolled her head negatively upon the pillow. "Even if I
should be well enough to take it to him, he won't like it. Though
why he should so particular want to look into the works of a poor
old woman's head-piece like mine when there's so many other folks
about, I don't know. I know how he'll answer me: 'A lonely person
like you, Grammer,' er woll say. 'What difference is it to you
what becomes of ye when the breath's out of your body?' Oh, it do
trouble me! If you only knew how he do chevy me round the chimmer
in my dreams, you'd pity me. How I could do it I can't think! But
'ch was always so rackless!...If I only had anybody to plead for
me!"

"Mrs. Melbury would, I am sure."

"Ay; but he wouldn't hearken to she! It wants a younger face than
hers to work upon such as he."

Grace started with comprehension. "You don't think he would do it
for me?" she said.

"Oh, wouldn't he!"

"I couldn't go to him, Grammer, on any account. I don't know him
at all."

"Ah, if I were a young lady," said the artful Grammer, "and could
save a poor old woman's skellington from a heathen doctor instead
of a Christian grave, I would do it, and be glad to. But nobody
will do anything for a poor old familiar friend but push her out
of the way."

You are very ungrateful, Grammer, to say that. But you are ill, I
know, and that's why you speak so. Now believe me, you are not
going to die yet. Remember you told me yourself that you meant to
keep him waiting many a year."

"Ay, one can joke when one is well, even in old age; but in
sickness one's gayety falters to grief; and that which seemed
small looks large; and the grim far-off seems near."

Grace's eyes had tears in them. "I don't like to go to him on
such an errand, Grammer," she said, brokenly. "But I will, to
ease your mind."

It was with extreme reluctance that Grace cloaked herself next
morning for the undertaking. She was all the more indisposed to
the journey by reason of Grammer's allusion to the effect of a
pretty face upon Dr. Fitzpiers; and hence she most illogically did
that which, had the doctor never seen her, would have operated to
stultify the sole motive of her journey; that is to say, she put
on a woollen veil, which hid all her face except an occasional
spark of her eyes.

Her own wish that nothing should be known of this strange and
grewsome proceeding, no less than Grammer Oliver's own desire, led
Grace to take every precaution against being discovered. She went
out by the garden door as the safest way, all the household having
occupations at the other side. The morning looked forbidding
enough when she stealthily opened it. The battle between frost
and thaw was continuing in mid-air: the trees dripped on the
garden-plots, where no vegetables would grow for the dripping,
though they were planted year after year with that curious
mechanical regularity of country people in the face of
hopelessness; the moss which covered the once broad gravel terrace
was swamped; and Grace stood irresolute. Then she thought of poor
Grammer, and her dreams of the doctor running after her, scalpel
in hand, and the possibility of a case so curiously similar to
South's ending in the same way; thereupon she stepped out into the
drizzle.

The nature of her errand, and Grammer Oliver's account of the
compact she had made, lent a fascinating horror to Grace's
conception of Fitzpiers. She knew that he was a young man; but
her single object in seeking an interview with him put all
considerations of his age and social aspect from her mind.
Standing as she stood, in Grammer Oliver's shoes, he was simply a
remorseless Jove of the sciences, who would not have mercy, and
would have sacrifice; a man whom, save for this, she would have
preferred to avoid knowing. But since, in such a small village,
it was improbable that any long time could pass without their
meeting, there was not much to deplore in her having to meet him
now.

But, as need hardly be said, Miss Melbury's view of the doctor as
a merciless, unwavering, irresistible scientist was not quite in
accordance with fact. The real Dr. Fitzpiers w as a man of too
many hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in
the profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide practice
in the rural district he had marked out as his field of survey for
the present. In the course of a year his mind was accustomed to
pass in a grand solar sweep through all the zodiacal signs of the
intellectual heaven. Sometimes it was in the Ram, sometimes in
the Bull; one month he would be immersed in alchemy, another in
poesy; one month in the Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in
the Crab of German literature and metaphysics. In justice to him
it must be stated that he took such studies as were immediately
related to his own profession in turn with the rest, and it had
been in a month of anatomical ardor without the possibility of a
subject that he had proposed to Grammer Oliver the terms she had
mentioned to her mistress.

As may be inferred from the tone of his conversation with
Winterborne, he had lately plunged into abstract philosophy with
much zest; perhaps his keenly appreciative, modern, unpractical
mind found this a realm more to his taste than any other. Though
his aims were desultory, Fitzpiers's mental constitution was not
without its admirable side; a keen inquirer he honestly was, even
if the midnight rays of his lamp, visible so far through the trees
of Hintock, lighted rank literatures of emotion and passion as
often as, or oftener than, the books and materiel of science.

But whether he meditated the Muses or the philosophers, the
loneliness of Hintock life was beginning to tell upon his
impressionable nature. Winter in a solitary house in the country,
without society, is tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful,
given certain conditions, but these are not the conditions which
attach to the life of a professional man who drops down into such
a place by mere accident. They were present to the lives of
Winterborne, Melbury, and Grace; but not to the doctor's. They
are old association--an almost exhaustive biographical or
historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate,
within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those
invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the
fields which look so gray from his windows; recall whose creaking
plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands
planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose
horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds
affect that particular brake; what domestic dramas of love,
jealousy, revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the
cottages, the mansion, the street, or on the green. The spot may
have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack
memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there
without opportunity of intercourse with his kind.

In such circumstances, maybe, an old man dreams of an ideal
friend, till he throws himself into the arms of any impostor who
chooses to wear that title on his face. A young man may dream of
an ideal friend likewise, but some humor of the blood will
probably lead him to think rather of an ideal mistress, and at
length the rustle of a woman's dress, the sound of her voice, or
the transit of her form across the field of his vision, will
enkindle his soul with a flame that blinds his eyes.

The discovery of the attractive Grace's name and family would have
been enough in other circumstances to lead the doctor, if not to
put her personality out of his head, to change the character of
his interest in her. Instead of treasuring her image as a rarity,
he would at most have played with it as a toy. He was that kind
of a man. But situated here he could not go so far as amative
cruelty. He dismissed all reverential thought about her, but he
could not help taking her seriously.

He went on to imagine the impossible. So far, indeed, did he go
in this futile direction that, as others are wont to do, he
constructed dialogues and scenes in which Grace had turned out to
be the mistress of Hintock Manor-house, the mysterious Mrs.
Charmond, particularly ready and willing to be wooed by himself
and nobody else. "Well, she isn't that," he said, finally. "But
she's a very sweet, nice, exceptional girl."

The next morning he breakfasted alone, as usual. It was snowing
with a fine-flaked desultoriness just sufficient to make the
woodland gray, without ever achieving whiteness. There was not a
single letter for Fitzpiers, only a medical circular and a weekly
newspaper.

To sit before a large fire on such mornings, and read, and
gradually acquire energy till the evening came, and then, with
lamp alight, and feeling full of vigor, to pursue some engrossing
subject or other till the small hours, had hitherto been his
practice. But to-day he could not settle into his chair. That
self-contained position he had lately occupied, in which the only
attention demanded was the concentration of the inner eye, all
outer regard being quite gratuitous, seemed to have been taken by
insidious stratagem, and for the first time he had an interest
outside the house. He walked from one window to another, and
became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the
solitude of remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable
company.

The breakfast hour went by heavily enough, and the next followed,
in the same half-snowy, half-rainy style, the weather now being
the inevitable relapse which sooner or later succeeds a time too
radiant for the season, such as they had enjoyed in the late
midwinter at Hintock. To people at home there these changeful
tricks had their interests; the strange mistakes that some of the
more sanguine trees had made in budding before their month, to be
incontinently glued up by frozen thawings now; the similar
sanguine errors of impulsive birds in framing nests that were now
swamped by snow-water, and other such incidents, prevented any
sense of wearisomeness in the minds of the natives. But these
were features of a world not familiar to Fitzpiers, and the inner
visions to which he had almost exclusively attended having
suddenly failed in their power to absorb him, he felt unutterably
dreary.

He wondered how long Miss Melbury was going to stay in Hintock.
The season was unpropitious for accidental encounters with her
out-of-doors, and except by accident he saw not how they were to
become acquainted. One thing was clear--any acquaintance with her
could only, with a due regard to his future, be casual, at most of
the nature of a flirtation; for he had high aims, and they would
some day lead him into other spheres than this.

Thus desultorily thinking he flung himself down upon the couch,
which, as in many draughty old country houses, was constructed
with a hood, being in fact a legitimate development from the
settle. He tried to read as he reclined, but having sat up till
three o'clock that morning, the book slipped from his hand and he
fell asleep.

CHAPTER XVIII.

It was at this time that Grace approached the house. Her knock,
always soft in virtue of her nature, was softer to-day by reason
of her strange errand. However, it was heard by the farmer's wife
who kept the house, and Grace was admitted. Opening the door of
the doctor's room the housewife glanced in, and imagining
Fitzpiers absent, asked Miss Melbury to enter and wait a few
minutes while she should go and find him, believing him to be
somewhere on the premises. Grace acquiesced, went in, and sat
down close to the door.

As soon as the door was shut upon her she looked round the room,
and started at perceiving a handsome man snugly ensconced in the
couch, like the recumbent figure within some canopied mural tomb
of the fifteenth century, except that his hands were by no means
clasped in prayer. She had no doubt that this was the doctor.
Awaken him herself she could not, and her immediate impulse was to
go and pull the broad ribbon with a brass rosette which hung at
one side of the fireplace. But expecting the landlady to re-enter
in a moment she abandoned this intention, and stood gazing in
great embarrassment at the reclining philosopher.

The windows of Fitzpiers's soul being at present shuttered, he
probably appeared less impressive than in his hours of animation;
but the light abstracted from his material presence by sleep was
more than counterbalanced by the mysterious influence of that
state, in a stranger, upon the consciousness of a beholder so
sensitive. So far as she could criticise at all, she became aware
that she had encountered a specimen of creation altogether unusual
in that locality. The occasions on which Grace had observed men
of this stamp were when she had been far removed away from
Hintock, and even then such examples as had met her eye were at a
distance, and mainly of coarser fibre than the one who now
confronted her.

She nervously wondered why the woman had not discovered her
mistake and returned, and went again towards the bell-pull.
Approaching the chimney her back was to Fitzpiers, but she could
see him in the glass. An indescribable thrill passed through her
as she perceived that the eyes of the reflected image were open,
gazing wonderingly at her, and under the curious unexpectedness of
the sight she became as if spellbound, almost powerless to turn
her head and regard the original. However, by an effort she did
turn, when there he lay asleep the same as before.

Her startled perplexity as to what he could be meaning was
sufficient to lead her to precipitately abandon her errand. She
crossed quickly to the door, opened and closed it noiselessly, and
went out of the house unobserved. By the time that she had gone
down the path and through the garden door into the lane she had
recovered her equanimity. Here, screened by the hedge, she stood
and considered a while.

Drip, drip, drip, fell the rain upon her umbrella and around; she
had come out on such a morning because of the seriousness of the
matter in hand; yet now she had allowed her mission to be
stultified by a momentary tremulousness concerning an incident
which perhaps had meant nothing after all.

In the mean time her departure from the room, stealthy as it had
been, had roused Fitzpiers, and he sat up. In the reflection from
the mirror which Grace had beheld there was no mystery; he had
opened his eyes for a few moments, but had immediately relapsed
into unconsciousness, if, indeed, he had ever been positively
awake. That somebody had just left the room he was certain, and
that the lovely form which seemed to have visited him in a dream
was no less than the real presentation of the person departed he
could hardly doubt.

Looking out of the window a few minutes later, down the box-edged
gravel-path which led to the bottom, he saw the garden door gently
open, and through it enter the young girl of his thoughts, Grace
having just at this juncture determined to return and attempt the
interview a second time. That he saw her coming instead of going
made him ask himself if his first impression of her were not a
dream indeed. She came hesitatingly along, carrying her umbrella
so low over her head that he could hardly see her face. When she
reached the point where the raspberry bushes ended and the
strawberry bed began, she made a little pause.

Fitzpiers feared that she might not be coming to him even now, and
hastily quitting the room, he ran down the path to meet her. The
nature of her errand he could not divine, but he was prepared to
give her any amount of encouragement.

"I beg pardon, Miss Melbury," he said. "I saw you from the
window, and fancied you might imagine that I was not at home--if
it is I you were coming for."

"I was coming to speak one word to you, nothing more," she
replied. "And I can say it here."

"No, no. Please do come in. Well, then, if you will not come
into the house, come as far as the porch."

Thus pressed she went on to the porch, and they stood together
inside it, Fitzpiers closing her umbrella for her.

"I have merely a request or petition to make," she said. "My
father's servant is ill--a woman you know--and her illness is
serious."

"I am sorry to hear it. You wish me to come and see her at once?"

"No; I particularly wish you not to come."

"Oh, indeed."

"Yes; and she wishes the same. It would make her seriously worse
if you were to come. It would almost kill her....My errand is of
a peculiar and awkward nature. It is concerning a subject which
weighs on her mind--that unfortunate arrangement she made with
you, that you might have her body--after death."

"Oh! Grammer Oliver, the old woman with the fine head. Seriously
ill, is she!"

"And SO disturbed by her rash compact! I have brought the money
back--will you please return to her the agreement she signed?"
Grace held out to him a couple of five-pound notes which she had
kept ready tucked in her glove.

Without replying or considering the notes, Fitzpiers allowed his
thoughts to follow his eyes, and dwell upon Grace's personality,
and the sudden close relation in which he stood to her. The porch
was narrow; the rain increased. It ran off the porch and dripped
on the creepers, and from the creepers upon the edge of Grace's
cloak and skirts.

"The rain is wetting your dress; please do come in," he said. "It
really makes my heart ache to let you stay here."

Immediately inside the front door was the door of his sitting-
room; he flung it open, and stood in a coaxing attitude. Try how
she would, Grace could not resist the supplicatory mandate written
in the face and manner of this man, and distressful resignation
sat on her as she glided past him into the room--brushing his coat
with her elbow by reason of the narrowness.

He followed her, shut the door--which she somehow had hoped he
would leave open--and placing a chair for her, sat down. The
concern which Grace felt at the development of these commonplace
incidents was, of course, mainly owing to the strange effect upon
her nerves of that view of him in the mirror gazing at her with
open eyes when she had thought him sleeping, which made her fancy
that his slumber might have been a feint based on inexplicable
reasons.

She again proffered the notes; he awoke from looking at her as at
a piece of live statuary, and listened deferentially as she said,
"Will you then reconsider, and cancel the bond which poor Grammer
Oliver so foolishly gave?"

"I'll cancel it without reconsideration. Though you will allow me
to have my own opinion about her foolishness. Grammer is a very
wise woman, and she was as wise in that as in other things. You
think there was something very fiendish in the compact, do you
not, Miss Melbury? But remember that the most eminent of our
surgeons in past times have entered into such agreements."

"Not fiendish--strange."

"Yes, that may be, since strangeness is not in the nature of a
thing, but in its relation to something extrinsic--in this case an
unessential observer."

He went to his desk, and searching a while found a paper, which be
unfolded and brought to her. A thick cross appeared in ink at the
bottom--evidently from the hand of Grammer. Grace put the paper
in her pocket with a look of much relief.

As Fitzpiers did not take up the money (half of which had come
from Grace's own purse), she pushed it a little nearer to him.
"No, no. I shall not take it from the old woman," he said. "It
is more strange than the fact of a surgeon arranging to obtain a
subject for dissection that our acquaintance should be formed out
of it."

"I am afraid you think me uncivil in showing my dislike to the
notion. But I did not mean to be."

"Oh no, no."  He looked at her, as he had done before, with
puzzled interest. "I cannot think, I cannot think," he murmured.
"Something bewilders me greatly."  He still reflected and
hesitated. "Last night I sat up very late," he at last went on,
"and on that account I fell into a little nap on that couch about
half an hour ago. And during my few minutes of unconsciousness I
dreamed--what do you think?--that you stood in the room."

Should she tell? She merely blushed.

"You may imagine," Fitzpiers continued, now persuaded that it had,
indeed, been a dream, "that I should not have dreamed of you
without considerable thinking about you first."

He could not be acting; of that she felt assured.

"I fancied in my vision that you stood there," he said, pointing
to where she had paused. "I did not see you directly, but
reflected in the glass. I thought, what a lovely creature! The
design is for once carried out. Nature has at last recovered her
lost union with the Idea! My thoughts ran in that direction
because I had been reading the work of a transcendental
philosopher last night; and I dare say it was the dose of Idealism
that I received from it that made me scarcely able to distinguish
between reality and fancy. I almost wept when I awoke, and found
that you had appeared to me in Time, but not in Space, alas!"

At moments there was something theatrical in the delivery of
Fitzpiers's effusion; yet it would have been inexact to say that
it was intrinsically theatrical. It often happens that in
situations of unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of
criticism, real feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not
easily distinguishable from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation
overlies a bulk of truth, with the evil consequence, if perceived,
that the substance is estimated by the superficies, and the whole
rejected.

Grace, however, was no specialist in men's manners, and she
admired the sentiment without thinking of the form. And she was
embarrassed: "lovely creature" made explanation awkward to her
gentle modesty.

"But can it be," said he, suddenly, "that you really were here?"

"I have to confess that I have been in the room once before,"
faltered she. "The woman showed me in, and went away to fetch
you; but as she did not return, I left."

"And you saw me asleep," he murmured, with the faintest show of
humiliation.

"Yes--IF you were asleep, and did not deceive me."

"Why do you say if?"

"I saw your eyes open in the glass, but as they were closed when I
looked round upon you, I thought you were perhaps deceiving me.

"Never," said Fitzpiers, fervently--"never could I deceive you."

Foreknowledge to the distance of a year or so in either of them
might have spoiled the effect of that pretty speech. Never
deceive her! But they knew nothing, and the phrase had its day.

Grace began now to be anxious to terminate the interview, but the
compelling power of Fitzpiers's atmosphere still held her there.
She was like an inexperienced actress who, having at last taken up
her position on the boards, and spoken her speeches, does not know
how to move off. The thought of Grammer occurred to her. "I'll
go at once and tell poor Grammer of your generosity," she said.
"It will relieve her at once."

"Grammer's a nervous disease, too--how singular!" he answered,
accompanying her to the door. "One moment; look at this--it is
something which may interest you."

He had thrown open the door on the other side of the passage, and
she saw a microscope on the table of the confronting room. "Look
into it, please; you'll be interested," he repeated.

She applied her eye, and saw the usual circle of light patterned
all over with a cellular tissue of some indescribable sort. "What
do you think that is?" said Fitzpiers.

She did not know.

"That's a fragment of old John South's brain, which I am
investigating."

She started back, not with aversion, but with wonder as to how it
should have got there. Fitzpiers laughed.

"Here am I," he said, "endeavoring to carry on simultaneously the
study of physiology and transcendental philosophy, the material
world and the ideal, so as to discover if possible a point of
contrast between them; and your finer sense is quite offended!"

"Oh no, Mr. Fitzpiers," said Grace, earnestly. "It is not so at
all. I know from seeing your light at night how deeply you
meditate and work. Instead of condemning you for your studies, I
admire you very much!"

Her face, upturned from the microscope, was so sweet, sincere, and
self-forgetful in its aspect that the susceptible Fitzpiers more
than wished to annihilate the lineal yard which separated it from
his own. Whether anything of the kind showed in his eyes or not,
Grace remained no longer at the microscope, but quickly went her
way into the rain.

CHAPTER XIX.

Instead of resuming his investigation of South's brain, which
perhaps was not so interesting under the microscope as might have
been expected from the importance of that organ in life, Fitzpiers
reclined and ruminated on the interview. Grace's curious
susceptibility to his presence, though it was as if the currents
of her life were disturbed rather than attracted by him, added a
special interest to her general charm. Fitzpiers was in a
distinct degree scientific, being ready and zealous to interrogate
all physical manifestations, but primarily he was an idealist. He
believed that behind the imperfect lay the perfect; that rare
things were to be discovered amid a bulk of commonplace; that
results in a new and untried case might be different from those in
other cases where the conditions had been precisely similar.
Regarding his own personality as one of unbounded possibilities,
because it was his own--notwithstanding that the factors of his
life had worked out a sorry product for thousands--he saw nothing
but what was regular in his discovery at Hintock of an altogether
exceptional being of the other sex, who for nobody else would have
had any existence.

One habit of Fitzpiers's--commoner in dreamers of more advanced
age than in men of his years--was that of talking to himself. He
paced round his room with a selective tread upon the more
prominent blooms of the carpet, and murmured, "This phenomenal
girl will be the light of my life while I am at Hintock; and the
special beauty of the situation is that our attitude and relations
to each other will be purely spiritual. Socially we can never be
intimate. Anything like matrimonial intentions towards her,
charming as she is, would be absurd. They would spoil the
ethereal character of my regard. And, indeed, I have other aims
on the practical side of my life."

Fitzpiers bestowed a regulation thought on the advantageous
marriage he was bound to make with a woman of family as good as
his own, and of purse much longer. But as an object of
contemplation for the present, as objective spirit rather than
corporeal presence, Grace Melbury would serve to keep his soul
alive, and to relieve the monotony of his days.

His first notion--acquired from the mere sight of her without
converse--that of an idle and vulgar flirtation with a timber-
merchant's pretty daughter, grated painfully upon him now that he
had found what Grace intrinsically was. Personal intercourse with
such as she could take no lower form than intellectual communion,
and mutual explorations of the world of thought. Since he could
not call at her father's, having no practical views, cursory
encounters in the lane, in the wood, coming and going to and from
church, or in passing her dwelling, were what the acquaintance
would have to feed on.

Such anticipated glimpses of her now and then realized themselves
in the event. Rencounters of not more than a minute's duration,
frequently repeated, will build up mutual interest, even an
intimacy, in a lonely place. Theirs grew as imperceptibly as the
tree-twigs budded. There never was a particular moment at which
it could be said they became friends; yet a delicate understanding
now existed between two who in the winter had been strangers.

Spring weather came on rather suddenly, the unsealing of buds that
had long been swollen accomplishing itself in the space of one
warm night. The rush of sap in the veins of the trees could
almost be heard. The flowers of late April took up a position
unseen, and looked as if they had been blooming a long while,
though there had been no trace of them the day before yesterday;
birds began not to mind getting wet. In-door people said they had
heard the nightingale, to which out-door people replied
contemptuously that they had heard him a fortnight before.

The young doctor's practice being scarcely so large as a London
surgeon's, he frequently walked in the wood. Indeed such practice
as he had he did not follow up with the assiduity that would have
been necessary for developing it to exceptional proportions. One
day, book in hand, he walked in a part of the wood where the trees
were mainly oaks. It was a calm afternoon, and there was
everywhere around that sign of great undertakings on the part of
vegetable nature which is apt to fill reflective human beings who
are not undertaking much themselves with a sudden uneasiness at
the contrast. He heard in the distance a curious sound, something
like the quack of a duck, which, though it was common enough here
about this time, was not common to him.

Looking through the trees Fitzpiers soon perceived the origin of
the noise. The barking season had just commenced, and what he had
heard was the tear of the ripping tool as it ploughed its way
along the sticky parting between the trunk and the rind. Melbury
did a large business in bark, and as he was Grace's father, and
possibly might be found on the spot, Fitzpiers was attracted to
the scene even more than he might have been by its intrinsic
interest. When he got nearer he recognized among the workmen the
two Timothys, and Robert Creedle, who probably had been "lent" by
Winterborne; Marty South also assisted.

Each tree doomed to this flaying process was first attacked by
Creedle. With a small billhook he carefully freed the collar of
the tree from twigs and patches of moss which incrusted it to a
height of a foot or two above the ground, an operation comparable
to the "little toilet" of the executioner's victim. After this it
was barked in its erect position to a point as high as a man could
reach. If a fine product of vegetable nature could ever be said
to look ridiculous it was the case now, when the oak stood naked-
legged, and as if ashamed, till the axe-man came and cut a ring
round it, and the two Timothys finished the work with the
crosscut-saw.

As soon as it had fallen the barkers attacked it like locusts, and
in a short time not a particle of rind was left on the trunk and
larger limbs. Marty South was an adept at peeling the upper
parts, and there she stood encaged amid the mass of twigs and buds
like a great bird, running her tool into the smallest branches,
beyond the farthest points to which the skill and patience of the
men enabled them to proceed--branches which, in their lifetime,
had swayed high above the bulk of the wood, and caught the latest
and earliest rays of the sun and moon while the lower part of the
forest was still in darkness.

"You seem to have a better instrument than they, Marty," said
Fitzpiers.

"No, sir," she said, holding up the tool--a horse's leg-bone
fitted into a handle and filed to an edge--"'tis only that they've
less patience with the twigs, because their time is worth more
than mine."

A little shed had been constructed on the spot, of thatched
hurdles and boughs, and in front of it was a fire, over which a
kettle sung. Fitzpiers sat down inside the shelter, and went on
with his reading, except when he looked up to observe the scene
and the actors. The thought that he might settle here and become
welded in with this sylvan life by marrying Grace Melbury crossed
his mind for a moment. Why should he go farther into the world
than where he was? The secret of quiet happiness lay in limiting
the ideas and aspirations; these men's thoughts were conterminous
with the margin of the Hintock woodlands, and why should not his
be likewise limited--a small practice among the people around him
being the bound of his desires?

Presently Marty South discontinued her operations upon the
quivering boughs, came out from the reclining oak, and prepared
tea. When it was ready the men were called; and Fitzpiers being
in a mood to join, sat down with them.

The latent reason of his lingering here so long revealed itself
when the faint creaking of the joints of a vehicle became audible,
and one of the men said, "Here's he." Turning their heads they saw
Melbury's gig approaching, the wheels muffled by the yielding
moss.

The timber-merchant was on foot leading the horse, looking back at
every few steps to caution his daughter, who kept her seat, where
and how to duck her head so as to avoid the overhanging branches.
They stopped at the spot where the bark-ripping had been
temporarily suspended; Melbury cursorily examined the heaps of
bark, and drawing near to where the workmen were sitting down,
accepted their shouted invitation to have a dish of tea, for which
purpose he hitched the horse to a bough. (Grace declined to take
any of their beverage, and remained in her place in the vehicle,
looking dreamily at the sunlight that came in thin threads through
the hollies with which the oaks were interspersed.

When Melbury stepped up close to the shelter, he for the first
time perceived that the doctor was present, and warmly appreciated
Fitzpiers's invitation to sit down on the log beside him.

"Bless my heart, who would have thought of finding you here," he
said, obviously much pleased at the circumstance. "I wonder now
if my daughter knows you are so nigh at hand. I don't expect she
do."

He looked out towards the gig wherein Grace sat, her face still
turned in the opposite direction. "She doesn't see us. Well,
never mind: let her be."

Grace was indeed quite unconscious of Fitzpiers's propinquity.
She was thinking of something which had little connection with the
scene before her--thinking of her friend, lost as soon as found,
Mrs. Charmond; of her capricious conduct, and of the contrasting
scenes she was possibly enjoying at that very moment in other
climes, to which Grace herself had hoped to be introduced by her
friend's means. She wondered if this patronizing lady would
return to Hintock during the summer, and whether the acquaintance
which had been nipped on the last occasion of her residence there
would develop on the next.

Melbury told ancient timber-stories as he sat, relating them
directly to Fitzpiers, and obliquely to the men, who had heard
them often before. Marty, who poured out tea, was just saying, "I
think I'll take out a cup to Miss Grace," when they heard a
clashing of the gig-harness, and turning round Melbury saw that
the horse had become restless, and was jerking about the vehicle
in a way which alarmed its occupant, though she refrained from
screaming. Melbury jumped up immediately, but not more quickly
than Fitzpiers; and while her father ran to the horse's head and
speedily began to control him, Fitzpiers was alongside the gig
assisting Grace to descend. Her surprise at his appearance was so
great that, far from making a calm and independent descent, she
was very nearly lifted down in his arms. He relinquished her when
she touched ground, and hoped she was not frightened.

"Oh no, not much," she managed to say. "There was no danger--
unless he had run under the trees where the boughs are low enough
to hit my head."

"Which was by no means an impossibility, and justifies any amount
of alarm."

He referred to what he thought he saw written in her face, and she
could not tell him that this had little to do with the horse, but
much with himself. His contiguity had, in fact, the same effect
upon her as on those former occasions when he had come closer to
her than usual--that of producing in her an unaccountable tendency
to tearfulness. Melbury soon put the horse to rights, and seeing
that Grace was safe, turned again to the work-people. His
daughter's nervous distress had passed off in a few moments, and
she said quite gayly to Fitzpiers as she walked with him towards
the group, "There's destiny in it, you see. I was doomed to join
in your picnic, although I did not intend to do so."

Marty prepared her a comfortable place, and she sat down in the
circle, and listened to Fitzpiers while he drew from her father
and the bark-rippers sundry narratives of their fathers', their
grandfathers', and their own adventures in these woods; of the
mysterious sights they had seen--only to be accounted for by
supernatural agency; of white witches and black witches; and the
standard story of the spirits of the two brothers who had fought
and fallen, and had haunted Hintock House till they were exorcised
by the priest, and compelled to retreat to a swamp in this very
wood, whence they were returning to their old quarters at the rate
of a cock's stride every New-year's Day, old style; hence the
local saying, "On New-year's tide, a cock's stride."

It was a pleasant time. The smoke from the little fire of peeled
sticks rose between the sitters and the sunlight, and behind its
blue veil stretched the naked arms of the prostrate trees The
smell of the uncovered sap mingled with the smell of the burning
wood, and the sticky inner surface of the scattered bark glistened
as it revealed its pale madder hues to the eye. Melbury was so
highly satisfied at having Fitzpiers as a sort of guest that he
would have sat on for any length of time, but Grace, on whom
Fitzpiers's eyes only too frequently alighted, seemed to think it
incumbent upon her to make a show of going; and her father
thereupon accompanied her to the vehicle.

As the doctor had helped her out of it he appeared to think that
he had excellent reasons for helping her in, and performed the
attention lingeringly enough.

"What were you almost in tears about just now?" he asked, softly.

"I don't know," she said: and the words were strictly true.

Melbury mounted on the other side, and they drove on out of the
grove, their wheels silently crushing delicate-patterned mosses,
hyacinths, primroses, lords-and-ladies, and other strange and
ordinary plants, and cracking up little sticks that lay across the
track. Their way homeward ran along the crest of a lofty hill,
whence on the right they beheld a wide valley, differing both in
feature and atmosphere from that of the Hintock precincts. It was
the cider country, which met the woodland district on the axis of
this hill. Over the vale the air was blue as sapphire--such a
blue as outside that apple-valley was never seen. Under the blue
the orchards were in a blaze of bloom, some of the richly flowered
trees running almost up to where they drove along. Over a gate
which opened down the incline a man leaned on his arms, regarding
this fair promise so intently that he did not observe their
passing.

"That was Giles," said Melbury, when they had gone by.

"Was it? Poor Giles," said she.

"All that blooth means heavy autumn work for him and his hands.
If no blight happens before the setting the apple yield will be
such as we have not had for years."

Meanwhile, in the wood they had come from, the men had sat on so
long that they were indisposed to begin work again that evening;
they were paid by the ton, and their time for labor was as they
chose. They placed the last gatherings of bark in rows for the
curers, which led them farther and farther away from the shed; and
thus they gradually withdrew as the sun went down.

Fitzpiers lingered yet. He had opened his book again, though he
could hardly see a word in it, and sat before the dying fire,
scarcely knowing of the men's departure. He dreamed and mused
till his consciousness seemed to occupy the whole space of the
woodland around, so little was there of jarring sight or sound to
hinder perfect unity with the sentiment of the place. The idea
returned upon him of sacrificing all practical aims to live in
calm contentment here, and instead of going on elaborating new
conceptions with infinite pains, to accept quiet domesticity
according to oldest and homeliest notions. These reflections
detained him till the wood was embrowned with the coming night,
and the shy little bird of this dusky time had begun to pour out
all the intensity of his eloquence from a bush not very far off.

Fitzpiers's eyes commanded as much of the ground in front as was
open. Entering upon this he saw a figure, whose direction of
movement was towards the spot where he sat. The surgeon was quite
shrouded from observation by the recessed shadow of the hut, and
there was no reason why he should move till the stranger had
passed by. The shape resolved itself into a woman's; she was
looking on the ground, and walking slowly as if searching for
something that had been lost, her course being precisely that of
Mr. Melbury's gig. Fitzpiers by a sort of divination jumped to
the idea that the figure was Grace's; her nearer approach made the
guess a certainty.

Yes, she was looking for something; and she came round by the
prostrate trees that would have been invisible but for the white
nakedness which enabled her to avoid them easily. Thus she
approached the heap of ashes, and acting upon what was suggested
by a still shining ember or two, she took a stick and stirred the
heap, which thereupon burst into a flame. On looking around by
the light thus obtained she for the first time saw the illumined
face of Fitzpiers, precisely in the spot where she had left him.

Grace gave a start and a scream: the place had been associated
with him in her thoughts, but she had not expected to find him
there still. Fitzpiers lost not a moment in rising and going to
her side.

"I frightened you dreadfully, I know," he said. "I ought to have
spoken; but I did not at first expect it to be you. I have been
sitting here ever since."

He was actually supporting her with his arm, as though under the
impression that she was quite overcome, and in danger of falling.
As soon as she could collect her ideas she gently withdrew from
his grasp, and explained what she had returned for: in getting up
or down from the gig, or when sitting by the hut fire, she had
dropped her purse.

"Now we will find it," said Fitzpiers.

He threw an armful of last year's leaves on to the fire, which
made the flame leap higher, and the encompassing shades to weave
themselves into a denser contrast, turning eve into night in a
moment. By this radiance they groped about on their hands and
knees, till Fitzpiers rested on his elbow, and looked at Grace.
"We must always meet in odd circumstances," he said; "and this is
one of the oddest. I wonder if it means anything?"

"Oh no, I am sure it doesn't," said Grace in haste, quickly
assuming an erect posture. "Pray don't say it any more."

"I hope there was not much money in the purse," said Fitzpiers,
rising to his feet more slowly, and brushing the leaves from his
trousers.

"Scarcely any. I cared most about the purse itself, because it
was given me. Indeed, money is of little more use at Hintock than
on Crusoe's island; there's hardly any way of spending it."

They had given up the search when Fitzpiers discerned something by
his foot. "Here it is," he said, "so that your father, mother,
friend, or ADMIRER will not have his or her feelings hurt by a
sense of your negligence after all."

"Oh, he knows nothing of what I do now."

"The admirer?" said Fitzpiers, slyly.

"I don't know if you would call him that," said Grace, with
simplicity. "The admirer is a superficial, conditional creature,
and this person is quite different."

"He has all the cardinal virtues."

"Perhaps--though I don't know them precisely."

"You unconsciously practise them, Miss Melbury, which is better.
According to Schleiermacher they are Self-control, Perseverance,
Wisdom, and Love; and his is the best list that I know."

"I am afraid poor--" She was going to say that she feared
Winterborne--the giver of the purse years before--had not much
perseverance, though he had all the other three; but she
determined to go no further in this direction, and was silent.

These half-revelations made a perceptible difference in Fitzpiers.
His sense of personal superiority wasted away, and Grace assumed
in his eyes the true aspect of a mistress in her lover's regard.

"Miss Melbury," he said, suddenly, "I divine that this virtuous
man you mention has been refused by you?"

She could do no otherwise than admit it.

"I do not inquire without good reason. God forbid that I should
kneel in another's place at any shrine unfairly. But, my dear
Miss Melbury, now that he is gone, may I draw near?"

"I--I can't say anything about that!" she cried, quickly.
"Because when a man has been refused you feel pity for him, and
like him more than you did before."

This increasing complication added still more value to Grace in
the surgeon's eyes: it rendered her adorable. "But cannot you
say?" he pleaded, distractedly.

"I'd rather not--I think I must go home at once."

"Oh yes," said Fitzpiers. But as he did not move she felt it
awkward to walk straight away from him; and so they stood silently
together. A diversion was created by the accident of two birds,
that had either been roosting above their heads or nesting there,
tumbling one over the other into the hot ashes at their feet,
apparently engrossed in a desperate quarrel that prevented the use
of their wings. They speedily parted, however, and flew up, and
were seen no more.

"That's the end of what is called love!" said some one.

The speaker was neither Grace nor Fitzpiers, but Marty South, who
approached with her face turned up to the sky in her endeavor to
trace the birds. Suddenly perceiving Grace, she exclaimed, "Oh,
Miss Melbury! I have been following they pigeons, and didn't see
you. And here's Mr. Winterborne!" she continued, shyly, as she
looked towards Fitzpiers, who stood in the background.

"Marty," Grace interrupted. "I want you to walk home with me--
will you? Come along." And without lingering longer she took hold
of Marty's arm and led her away.

They went between the spectral arms of the peeled trees as they
lay, and onward among the growing trees, by a path where there
were no oaks, and no barking, and no Fitzpiers--nothing but copse-
wood, between which the primroses could be discerned in pale
bunches. "I didn't know Mr. Winterborne was there," said Marty,
breaking the silence when they had nearly reached Grace's door.

"Nor was he," said Grace.

"But, Miss Melbury, I saw him."

"No," said Grace. "It was somebody else. Giles Winterborne is
nothing to me."

CHAPTER XX.

The leaves over Hintock grew denser in their substance, and the
woodland seemed to change from an open filigree to a solid opaque
body of infinitely larger shape and importance. The boughs cast
green shades, which hurt the complexion of the girls who walked
there; and a fringe of them which overhung Mr. Melbury's garden
dripped on his seed-plots when it rained, pitting their surface
all over as with pock-marks, till Melbury declared that gardens in
such a place were no good at all. The two trees that had creaked
all the winter left off creaking, the whir of the night-jar,
however, forming a very satisfactory continuation of uncanny music
from that quarter. Except at mid-day the sun was not seen
complete by the Hintock people, but rather in the form of numerous
little stars staring through the leaves.

Such an appearance it had on Midsummer Eve of this year, and as
the hour grew later, and nine o'clock drew on, the irradiation of
the daytime became broken up by weird shadows and ghostly nooks of
indistinctness. Imagination could trace upon the trunks and
boughs strange faces and figures shaped by the dying lights; the
surfaces of the holly-leaves would here and there shine like
peeping eyes, while such fragments of the sky as were visible
between the trunks assumed the aspect of sheeted forms and cloven
tongues. This was before the moonrise. Later on, when that
planet was getting command of the upper heaven, and consequently
shining with an unbroken face into such open glades as there were
in the neighborhood of the hamlet, it became apparent that the
margin of the wood which approached the timber-merchant's premises
was not to be left to the customary stillness of that reposeful
time.

Fitzpiers having heard a voice or voices, was looking over his
garden gate--where he now looked more frequently than into his
books--fancying that Grace might be abroad with some friends. He
was now irretrievably committed in heart to Grace Melbury, though
he was by no means sure that she was so far committed to him.
That the Idea had for once completely fulfilled itself in the
objective substance--which he had hitherto deemed an
impossibility--he was enchanted enough to fancy must be the case
at last. It was not Grace who had passed, however, but several of
the ordinary village girls in a group--some steadily walking, some
in a mood of wild gayety. He quietly asked his landlady, who was
also in the garden, what these girls were intending, and she
informed him that it being Old Midsummer Eve, they were about to
attempt some spell or enchantment which would afford them a
glimpse of their future partners for life. She declared it to be
an ungodly performance, and one which she for her part would never
countenance; saying which, she entered her house and retired to
bed.

The young man lit a cigar and followed the bevy of maidens slowly
up the road. They had turned into the wood at an opening between
Melbury's and Marty South's; but Fitzpiers could easily track them
by their voices, low as they endeavored to keep their tones.

In the mean time other inhabitants of Little Hintock had become
aware of the nocturnal experiment about to be tried, and were also
sauntering stealthily after the frisky maidens. Miss Melbury had
been informed by Marty South during the day of the proposed peep
into futurity, and, being only a girl like the rest, she was
sufficiently interested to wish to see the issue. The moon was so
bright and the night so calm that she had no difficulty in
persuading Mrs. Melbury to accompany her; and thus, joined by
Marty, these went onward in the same direction.

Passing Winterborne's house, they heard a noise of hammering.
Marty explained it. This was the last night on which his paternal
roof would shelter him, the days of grace since it fell into hand
having expired; and Giles was taking down his cupboards and
bedsteads with a view to an early exit next morning. His
encounter with Mrs. Charmond had cost him dearly.

When they had proceeded a little farther Marty was joined by
Grammer Oliver (who was as young as the youngest in such matters),
and Grace and Mrs. Melbury went on by themselves till they had
arrived at the spot chosen by the village daughters, whose primary
intention of keeping their expedition a secret had been quite
defeated. Grace and her step-mother paused by a holly-tree; and
at a little distance stood Fitzpiers under the shade of a young
oak, intently observing Grace, who was in the full rays of the
moon.

He watched her without speaking, and unperceived by any but Marty
and Grammer, who had drawn up on the dark side of the same holly
which sheltered Mrs. and Miss Melbury on its bright side. The two
former conversed in low tones.

"If they two come up in Wood next Midsummer Night they'll come as
one," said Grammer, signifying Fitzpiers and Grace. "Instead of
my skellington he'll carry home her living carcass before long.
But though she's a lady in herself, and worthy of any such as he,
it do seem to me that he ought to marry somebody more of the sort
of Mrs. Charmond, and that Miss Grace should make the best of
Winterborne."

Marty returned no comment; and at that minute the girls, some of
whom were from Great Hintock, were seen advancing to work the
incantation, it being now about midnight.

"Directly we see anything we'll run home as fast as we can," said
one, whose courage had begun to fail her. To this the rest
assented, not knowing that a dozen neighbors lurked in the bushes
around.

"I wish we had not thought of trying this," said another, "but had
contented ourselves with the hole-digging to-morrow at twelve, and
hearing our husbands' trades. It is too much like having dealings
with the Evil One to try to raise their forms."

However, they had gone too far to recede, and slowly began to
march forward in a skirmishing line through the trees towards the
deeper recesses of the wood. As far as the listeners could
gather, the particular form of black-art to be practised on this
occasion was one connected with the sowing of hemp-seed, a handful
of which was carried by each girl. At the moment of their advance
they looked back, and discerned the figure of Miss Melbury, who,
alone of all the observers, stood in the full face of the
moonlight, deeply engrossed in the proceedings. By contrast with
her life of late years they made her feel as if she had receded a
couple of centuries in the world's history. She was rendered
doubly conspicuous by her light dress, and after a few whispered
words, one of the girls--a bouncing maiden, plighted to young
Timothy Tangs--asked her if she would join in. Grace, with some
excitement, said that she would, and moved on a little in the rear
of the rest.

Soon the listeners could hear nothing of their proceedings beyond
the faintest occasional rustle of leaves. Grammer whispered again
to Marty: "Why didn't ye go and try your luck with the rest of the
maids?"

"I don't believe in it," said Marty, shortly.

"Why, half the parish is here--the silly hussies should have kept
it quiet. I see Mr. Winterborne through the leaves, just come up
with Robert Creedle. Marty, we ought to act the part o'
Providence sometimes. Do go and tell him that if he stands just
behind the bush at the bottom of the slope, Miss Grace must pass
down it when she comes back, and she will most likely rush into
his arms; for as soon as the clock strikes, they'll bundle back
home--along like hares. I've seen such larries before."

"Do you think I'd better?" said Marty, reluctantly.

"Oh yes, he'll bless ye for it."

"I don't want that kind of blessing." But after a moment's thought
she went and delivered the information; and Grammer had the
satisfaction of seeing Giles walk slowly to the bend in the leafy
defile along which Grace would have to return.

Meanwhile Mrs. Melbury, deserted by Grace, had perceived Fitzpiers
and Winterborne, and also the move of the latter. An improvement
on Grammer's idea entered the mind of Mrs. Melbury, for she had
lately discerned what her husband had not--that Grace was rapidly
fascinating the surgeon. She therefore drew near to Fitzpiers.

"You should be where Mr. Winterborne is standing," she said to
him, significantly. "She will run down through that opening much
faster than she went up it, if she is like the rest of the girls."

Fitzpiers did not require to be told twice. He went across to
Winterborne and stood beside him. Each knew the probable purpose
of the other in standing there, and neither spoke, Fitzpiers
scorning to look upon Winterborne as a rival, and Winterborne
adhering to the off-hand manner of indifference which had grown
upon him since his dismissal.

Neither Grammer nor Marty South had seen the surgeon's manoeuvre,
and, still to help Winterborne, as she supposed, the old woman
suggested to the wood-girl that she should walk forward at the
heels of Grace, and "tole" her down the required way if she showed
a tendency to run in another direction. Poor Marty, always doomed
to sacrifice desire to obligation, walked forward accordingly, and
waited as a beacon, still and silent, for the retreat of Grace and
her giddy companions, now quite out of hearing.

The first sound to break the silence was the distant note of Great
Hintock clock striking the significant hour. About a minute later
that quarter of the wood to which the girls had wandered resounded
with the flapping of disturbed birds; then two or three hares and
rabbits bounded down the glade from the same direction, and after
these the rustling and crackling of leaves and dead twigs denoted
the hurried approach of the adventurers, whose fluttering gowns
soon became visible. Miss Melbury, having gone forward quite in
the rear of the rest, was one of the first to return, and the
excitement being contagious, she ran laughing towards Marty, who
still stood as a hand-post to guide her; then, passing on, she
flew round the fatal bush where the undergrowth narrowed to a
gorge. Marty arrived at her heels just in time to see the result.
Fitzpiers had quickly stepped forward in front of Winterborne,
who, disdaining to shift his position, had turned on his heel, and
then the surgeon did what he would not have thought of doing but
for Mrs. Melbury's encouragement and the sentiment of an eve which
effaced conventionality. Stretching out his arms as the white
figure burst upon him, he captured her in a moment, as if she had
been a bird.

"Oh!" cried Grace, in her fright.

"You are in my arms, dearest," said Fitzpiers, "and I am going to
claim you, and keep you there all our two lives!"

She rested on him like one utterly mastered, and it was several
seconds before she recovered from this helplessness. Subdued
screams and struggles, audible from neighboring brakes, revealed
that there had been other lurkers thereabout for a similar
purpose. Grace, unlike most of these companions of hers, instead
of gasping and writhing, said in a trembling voice, "Mr.
Fitzpiers, will you let me go?"

"Certainly," he said, laughing; "as soon as you have recovered."

She waited another few moments, then quietly and firmly pushed him
aside, and glided on her path, the moon whitening her hot blush
away. But it had been enough--new relations between them had
begun.

The case of the other girls was different, as has been said. They
wrestled and tittered, only escaping after a desperate struggle.
Fitzpiers could hear these enactments still going on after Grace
had left him, and he remained on the spot where he had caught her,
Winterborne having gone away. On a sudden another girl came
bounding down the same descent that had been followed by Grace--a
fine-framed young woman with naked arms. Seeing Fitzpiers
standing there, she said, with playful effrontery, "May'st kiss me
if 'canst catch me, Tim!"

Fitzpiers recognized her as Suke Damson, a hoydenish damsel of
the hamlet, who was plainly mistaking him for her lover. He was
impulsively disposed to profit by her error, and as soon as she
began racing away he started in pursuit.

On she went under the boughs, now in light, now in shade, looking
over her shoulder at him every few moments and kissing her hand;
but so cunningly dodging about among the trees and moon-shades
that she never allowed him to get dangerously near her. Thus they
ran and doubled, Fitzpiers warming with the chase, till the sound
of their companions had quite died away. He began to lose hope of
ever overtaking her, when all at once, by way of encouragement,
she turned to a fence in which there was a stile and leaped over
it. Outside the scene was a changed one--a meadow, where the
half-made hay lay about in heaps, in the uninterrupted shine of
the now high moon.

Fitzpiers saw in a moment that, having taken to open ground, she
had placed herself at his mercy, and he promptly vaulted over
after her. She flitted a little way down the mead, when all at
once her light form disappeared as if it had sunk into the earth.
She had buried herself in one of the hay-cocks.

Fitzpiers, now thoroughly excited, was not going to let her escape
him thus. He approached, and set about turning over the heaps one
by one. As soon as he paused, tantalized and puzzled, he was
directed anew by an imitative kiss which came from her hiding-
place, and by snatches of a local ballad in the smallest voice she
could assume:

    "O come in from the foggy, foggy dew."

In a minute or two he uncovered her.

"Oh, 'tis not Tim!" said she, burying her face.

Fitzpiers, however, disregarded her resistance by reason of its
mildness, stooped and imprinted the purposed kiss, then sunk down
on the next hay-cock, panting with his race.

"Whom do you mean by Tim?" he asked, presently.

"My young man, Tim Tangs," said she.

"Now, honor bright, did you really think it was he?"

"I did at first."

"But you didn't at last?"

"I didn't at last."

"Do you much mind that it was not?"

"No," she answered, slyly.

Fitzpiers did not pursue his questioning. In the moonlight Suke
looked very beautiful, the scratches and blemishes incidental to
her out-door occupation being invisible under these pale rays.
While they remain silent the coarse whir of the eternal night-jar
burst sarcastically from the top of a tree at the nearest corner
of the wood. Besides this not a sound of any kind reached their
ears, the time of nightingales being now past, and Hintock lying
at a distance of two miles at least. In the opposite direction
the hay-field stretched away into remoteness till it was lost to
the eye in a soft mist.

CHAPTER XXI.

When the general stampede occurred Winterborne had also been
looking on, and encountering one of the girls, had asked her what
caused them all to fly.

She said with solemn breathlessness that they had seen something
very different from what they had hoped to see, and that she for
one would never attempt such unholy ceremonies again. "We saw
Satan pursuing us with his hour-glass. It was terrible!"

This account being a little incoherent, Giles went forward towards
the spot from which the girls had retreated. After listening
there a few minutes he heard slow footsteps rustling over the
leaves, and looking through a tangled screen of honeysuckle which
hung from a bough, he saw in the open space beyond a short stout
man in evening-dress, carrying on one arm a light overcoat and
also his hat, so awkwardly arranged as possibly to have suggested
the "hour-glass" to his timid observers--if this were the person
whom the girls had seen. With the other hand he silently
gesticulated and the moonlight falling upon his bare brow showed
him to have dark hair and a high forehead of the shape seen
oftener in old prints and paintings than in real life. His
curious and altogether alien aspect, his strange gestures, like
those of one who is rehearsing a scene to himself, and the unusual
place and hour, were sufficient to account for any trepidation
among the Hintock daughters at encountering him.

He paused, and looked round, as if he had forgotten where he was;
not observing Giles, who was of the color of his environment. The
latter advanced into the light. The gentleman held up his hand
and came towards Giles, the two meeting half-way.

"I have lost my way," said the stranger. "Perhaps you can put me
in the path again."  He wiped his forehead with the air of one
suffering under an agitation more than that of simple fatigue.

"The turnpike-road is over there," said Giles

"I don't want the turnpike-road," said the gentleman, impatiently.
"I came from that. I want Hintock House. Is there not a path to
it across here?"

"Well, yes, a sort of path. But it is hard to find from this
point. I'll show you the way, sir, with great pleasure."

"Thanks, my good friend. The truth is that I decided to walk
across the country after dinner from the hotel at Sherton, where I
am staying for a day or two. But I did not know it was so far."

"It is about a mile to the house from here."

They walked on together. As there was no path, Giles occasionally
stepped in front and bent aside the underboughs of the trees to
give his companion a passage, saying every now and then when the
twigs, on being released, flew back like whips, "Mind your eyes,
sir." To which the stranger replied, "Yes, yes," in a preoccupied
tone.

So they went on, the leaf-shadows running in their usual quick
succession over the forms of the pedestrians, till the stranger
said,

"Is it far?"

"Not much farther," said Winterborne. "The plantation runs up
into a corner here, close behind the house." He added with
hesitation, "You know, I suppose, sir, that Mrs. Charmond is not
at home?"

"You mistake," said the other, quickly. "Mrs. Charmond has been
away for some time, but she's at home now."

Giles did not contradict him, though he felt sure that the
gentleman was wrong.

"You are a native of this place?" the stranger said.

"Yes."

"Well, you are happy in having a home. It is what I don't
possess."

"You come from far, seemingly?"

"I come now from the south of Europe."

"Oh, indeed, sir. You are an Italian, or Spanish, or French
gentleman, perhaps?"

"I am not either."

Giles did not fill the pause which ensued, and the gentleman, who
seemed of an emotional nature, unable to resist friendship, at
length answered the question.

"I am an Italianized American, a South Carolinian by birth," he
said. "I left my native country on the failure of the Southern
cause, and have never returned to it since."

He spoke no more about himself, and they came to the verge of the
wood. Here, striding over the fence out upon the upland sward,
they could at once see the chimneys of the house in the gorge
immediately beneath their position, silent, still, and pale.

"Can you tell me the time?" the gentleman asked. "My watch has
stopped."

"It is between twelve and one," said Giles.

His companion expressed his astonishment. "I thought it between
nine and ten at latest! Dear me--dear me!"

He now begged Giles to return, and offered him a gold coin, which
looked like a sovereign, for the assistance rendered. Giles
declined to accept anything, to the surprise of the stranger, who,
on putting the money back into his pocket, said, awkwardly, "I
offered it because I want you to utter no word about this meeting
with me. Will you promise?"

Winterborne promised readily. He thereupon stood still while the
other ascended the slope. At the bottom he looked back dubiously.
Giles would no longer remain when he was so evidently desired to
leave, and returned through the boughs to Hintock.

He suspected that this man, who seemed so distressed and
melancholy, might be that lover and persistent wooer of Mrs.
Charmond whom he had heard so frequently spoken of, and whom it
was said she had treated cavalierly. But he received no
confirmation of his suspicion beyond a report which reached him a
few days later that a gentleman had called up the servants who
were taking care of Hintock House at an hour past midnight; and on
learning that Mrs. Charmond, though returned from abroad, was as
yet in London, he had sworn bitterly, and gone away without
leaving a card or any trace of himself.

The girls who related the story added that he sighed three times
before he swore, but this part of the narrative was not
corroborated. Anyhow, such a gentleman had driven away from the
hotel at Sherton next day in a carriage hired at that inn.

CHAPTER XXII.

The sunny, leafy week which followed the tender doings of
Midsummer Eve brought a visitor to Fitzpiers's door; a voice that
he knew sounded in the passage. Mr. Melbury had called. At first
he had a particular objection to enter the parlor, because his
boots were dusty, but as the surgeon insisted he waived the point
and came in.

Looking neither to the right nor to the left, hardly at Fitzpiers
himself, he put his hat under his chair, and with a preoccupied
gaze at the floor, he said, "I've called to ask you, doctor, quite
privately, a question that troubles me. I've a daughter, Grace,
an only daughter, as you may have heard. Well, she's been out in
the dew--on Midsummer Eve in particular she went out in thin
slippers to watch some vagary of the Hintock maids--and she's got
a cough, a distinct hemming and hacking, that makes me uneasy.
Now, I have decided to send her away to some seaside place for a
change--"

"Send her away!" Fitzpiers's countenance had fallen.

"Yes. And the question is, where would you advise me to send
her?"

The timber-merchant had happened to call at a moment when
Fitzpiers was at the spring-tide of a sentiment that Grace was a
necessity of his existence. The sudden pressure of her form upon
his breast as she came headlong round the bush had never ceased to
linger with him, ever since he adopted the manoeuvre for which the
hour and the moonlight and the occasion had been the only excuse.
Now she was to be sent away. Ambition? it could be postponed.
Family? culture and reciprocity of tastes had taken the place of
family nowadays. He allowed himself to be carried forward on the
wave of his desire.

"How strange, how very strange it is," he said, "that you should
have come to me about her just now. I have been thinking every
day of coming to you on the very same errand."

"Ah!--you have noticed, too, that her health----"

"I have noticed nothing the matter with her health, because there
is nothing. But, Mr. Melbury, I have seen your daughter several
times by accident. I have admired her infinitely, and I was
coming to ask you if I may become better acquainted with her--pay
my addresses to her?"

Melbury was looking down as he listened, and did not see the air
of half-misgiving at his own rashness that spread over Fitzpiers's
face as he made this declaration.

"You have--got to know her?" said Melbury, a spell of dead silence
having preceded his utterance, during which his emotion rose with
almost visible effect.

"Yes," said Fitzpiers.

"And you wish to become better acquainted with her? You mean with
a view to marriage--of course that is what you mean?"

"Yes," said the young man. "I mean, get acquainted with her, with
a view to being her accepted lover; and if we suited each other,
what would naturally follow."

The timber-merchant was much surprised, and fairly agitated; his
hand trembled as he laid by his walking-stick. "This takes me
unawares," said he, his voice wellnigh breaking down. "I don't
mean that there is anything unexpected in a gentleman being
attracted by her; but it did not occur to me that it would be you.
I always said," continued he, with a lump in his throat, "that my
Grace would make a mark at her own level some day. That was why I
educated her. I said to myself, 'I'll do it, cost what it may;'
though her mother-law was pretty frightened at my paying out so
much money year after year. I knew it would tell in the end.
'Where you've not good material to work on, such doings would be
waste and vanity,' I said. 'But where you have that material it
is sure to be worth while.'"

"I am glad you don't object," said Fitzpiers, almost wishing that
Grace had not been quite so cheap for him.

"If she is willing I don't object, certainly. Indeed," added the
honest man, "it would be deceit if I were to pretend to feel
anything else than highly honored personally; and it is a great
credit to her to have drawn to her a man of such good professional
station and venerable old family. That huntsman-fellow little
thought how wrong he was about her! Take her and welcome, sir."

"I'll endeavor to ascertain her mind."

"Yes, yes. But she will be agreeable, I should think. She ought
to be."

"I hope she may. Well, now you'll expect to see me frequently."

"Oh yes. But, name it all--about her cough, and her going away.
I had quite forgot that that was what I came about."

"I assure you," said the surgeon, "that her cough can only be the
result of a slight cold, and it is not necessary to banish her to
any seaside place at all."

Melbury looked unconvinced, doubting whether he ought to take
Fitzpiers's professional opinion in circumstances which naturally
led him to wish to keep her there. The doctor saw this, and
honestly dreading to lose sight of her, he said, eagerly, 'Between
ourselves, if I am successful with her I will take her away myself
for a month or two, as soon as we are married, which I hope will
be before the chilly weather comes on. This will be so very much
better than letting her go now."

The proposal pleased Melbury much. There could be hardly any
danger in postponing any desirable change of air as long as the
warm weather lasted, and for such a reason. Suddenly recollecting
himself, he said, "Your time must be precious, doctor. I'll get
home-along. I am much obliged to ye. As you will see her often,
you'll discover for yourself if anything serious is the matter."

"I can assure you it is nothing," said Fitzpiers, who had seen
Grace much oftener already than her father knew of.

When he was gone Fitzpiers paused, silent, registering his
sensations, like a man who has made a plunge for a pearl into a
medium of which he knows not the density or temperature. But he
had done it, and Grace was the sweetest girl alive.

As for the departed visitor, his own last words lingered in
Melbury's ears as he walked homeward; he felt that what he had
said in the emotion of the moment was very stupid, ungenteel, and
unsuited to a dialogue with an educated gentleman, the smallness
of whose practice was more than compensated by the former
greatness of his family. He had uttered thoughts before they were
weighed, and almost before they were shaped. They had expressed
in a certain sense his feeling at Fitzpiers's news, but yet they
were not right. Looking on the ground, and planting his stick at
each tread as if it were a flag-staff, he reached his own
precincts, where, as he passed through the court, he automatically
stopped to look at the men working in the shed and around. One of
them asked him a question about wagon-spokes.

"Hey?" said Melbury, looking hard at him. The man repeated the
words.

Melbury stood; then turning suddenly away without answering, he
went up the court and entered the house. As time was no object
with the journeymen, except as a thing to get past, they leisurely
surveyed the door through which he had disappeared.

"What maggot has the gaffer got in his head now?" said Tangs the
elder. "Sommit to do with that chiel of his! When you've got a
maid of yer own, John Upjohn, that costs ye what she costs him,
that will take the squeak out of your Sunday shoes, John! But
you'll never be tall enough to accomplish such as she; and 'tis a
lucky thing for ye, John, as things be. Well, be ought to have a
dozen--that would bring him to reason. I see 'em walking together
last Sunday, and when they came to a puddle he lifted her over
like a halfpenny doll. He ought to have a dozen; he'd let 'em
walk through puddles for themselves then."

Meanwhile Melbury had entered the house with the look of a man who
sees a vision before him. His wife was in the room. Without
taking off his hat he sat down at random.

"Luce--we've done it!" he said. "Yes--the thing is as I expected.
The spell, that I foresaw might be worked, has worked. She's done
it, and done it well. Where is she--Grace, I mean?"

"Up in her room--what has happened!"

Mr. Melbury explained the circumstances as coherently as he could.
"I told you so," he said. "A maid like her couldn't stay hid
long, even in a place like this. But where is Grace? Let's have
her down. Here--Gra-a-ace!"

She appeared after a reasonable interval, for she was sufficiently
spoiled by this father of hers not to put herself in a hurry,
however impatient his tones. "What is it, father?" said she, with
a smile.

"Why, you scamp, what's this you've been doing? Not home here more
than six months, yet, instead of confining yourself to your
father's rank, making havoc in the educated classes."

Though accustomed to show herself instantly appreciative of her
father's meanings, Grace was fairly unable to look anyhow but at a
loss now.

"No, no--of course you don't know what I mean, or you pretend you
don't; though, for my part, I believe women can see these things
through a double hedge. But I suppose I must tell ye. Why,
you've flung your grapnel over the doctor, and he's coming
courting forthwith."

"Only think of that, my dear! Don't you feel it a triumph?" said
Mrs. Melbury.

"Coming courting! I've done nothing to make him," Grace exclaimed.

"'Twasn't necessary that you should, 'Tis voluntary that rules in
these things....Well, he has behaved very honorably, and asked my
consent. You'll know what to do when he gets here, I dare say. I
needn't tell you to make it all smooth for him."

"You mean, to lead him on to marry me?"

"I do. Haven't I educated you for it?"

Grace looked out of the window and at the fireplace with no
animation in her face. "Why is it settled off-hand in this way?"
said she, coquettishly. "You'll wait till you hear what I think
of him, I suppose?"

"Oh yes, of course. But you see what a good thing it will be."

She weighed the statement without speaking.

"You will be restored to the society you've been taken away from,"
continued her father; "for I don't suppose he'll stay here long."

She admitted the advantage; but it was plain that though Fitzpiers
exercised a certain fascination over her when he was present, or
even more, an almost psychic influence, and though his impulsive
act in the wood had stirred her feelings indescribably, she had
never regarded him in the light of a destined husband. "I don't
know what to answer," she said. "I have learned that he is very
clever."

"He's all right, and he's coming here to see you."

A premonition that she could not resist him if he came strangely
moved her. "Of course, father, you remember that it is only
lately that Giles--"

"You know that you can't think of him. He has given up all claim
to you."

She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as he could
state his opinion, even though she had skill in speech, and her
father had none. That Fitzpiers acted upon her like a dram,
exciting her, throwing her into a novel atmosphere which biassed
her doings until the influence was over, when she felt something
of the nature of regret for the mood she had experienced--still
more if she reflected on the silent, almost sarcastic, criticism
apparent in Winterborne's air towards her--could not be told to
this worthy couple in words.

It so happened that on this very day Fitzpiers was called away
from Hintock by an engagement to attend some medical meetings, and
his visits, therefore, did not begin at once. A note, however,
arrived from him addressed to Grace, deploring his enforced
absence. As a material object this note was pretty and superfine,
a note of a sort that she had been unaccustomed to see since her
return to Hintock, except when a school friend wrote to her--a
rare instance, for the girls were respecters of persons, and many
cooled down towards the timber-dealer's daughter when she was out
of sight. Thus the receipt of it pleased her, and she afterwards
walked about with a reflective air.

In the evening her father, who knew that the note had come, said,
"Why be ye not sitting down to answer your letter? That's what
young folks did in my time."

She replied that it did not require an answer.

"Oh, you know best," he said. Nevertheless, he went about his
business doubting if she were right in not replying; possibly she
might be so mismanaging matters as to risk the loss of an alliance
which would bring her much happiness.

Melbury's respect for Fitzpiers was based less on his professional
position, which was not much, than on the standing of his family
in the county in by-gone days. That implicit faith in members of
long-established families, as such, irrespective of their personal
condition or character, which is still found among old-fashioned
people in the rural districts reached its full intensity in
Melbury. His daughter's suitor was descended from a family he had
heard of in his grandfather's time as being once great, a family
which had conferred its name upon a neighboring village; how,
then, could anything be amiss in this betrothal?

"I must keep her up to this," he said to his wife. "She sees it
is for her happiness; but still she's young, and may want a little
prompting from an older tongue."

CHAPTER XXIII.

With this in view he took her out for a walk, a custom of his when
he wished to say anything specially impressive. Their way was
over the top of that lofty ridge dividing their woodland from the
cider district, whence they had in the spring beheld the miles of
apple-trees in bloom. All was now deep green. The spot recalled
to Grace's mind the last occasion of her presence there, and she
said, "The promise of an enormous apple-crop is fulfilling itself,
is it not? I suppose Giles is getting his mills and presses
ready."

This was just what her father had not come there to talk about.
Without replying he raised his arm, and moved his finger till he
fixed it at a point. "There," he said, "you see that plantation
reaching over the hill like a great slug, and just behind the hill
a particularly green sheltered bottom? That's where Mr.
Fitzpiers's family were lords of the manor for I don't know how
many hundred years, and there stands the village of Buckbury
Fitzpiers. A wonderful property 'twas--wonderful!"

"But they are not lords of the manor there now."

"Why, no. But good and great things die as well as little and
foolish. The only ones representing the family now, I believe,
are our doctor and a maiden lady living I don't know where. You
can't help being happy, Grace, in allying yourself with such a
romantical family. You'll feel as if you've stepped into
history."

"We've been at Hintock as long as they've been at Buckbury; is it
not so? You say our name occurs in old deeds continually."

"Oh yes--as yeomen, copyholders, and such like. But think how
much better this will be for 'ee. You'll be living a high
intellectual life, such as has now become natural to you; and
though the doctor's practice is small here, he'll no doubt go to a
dashing town when he's got his hand in, and keep a stylish
carriage, and you'll be brought to know a good many ladies of
excellent society. If you should ever meet me then, Grace, you
can drive past me, looking the other way. I shouldn't expect you
to speak to me, or wish such a thing, unless it happened to be in
some lonely, private place where 'twouldn't lower ye at all.
Don't think such men as neighbor Giles your equal. He and I shall
be good friends enough, but he's not for the like of you. He's
lived our rough and homely life here, and his wife's life must be
rough and homely likewise."

So much pressure could not but produce some displacement. As
Grace was left very much to herself, she took advantage of one
fine day before Fitzpiers's return to drive into the aforesaid
vale where stood the village of Buckbury Fitzpiers. Leaving her
father's man at the inn with the horse and gig, she rambled onward
to the ruins of a castle, which stood in a field hard by. She had
no doubt that it represented the ancient stronghold of the
Fitzpiers family.

The remains were few, and consisted mostly of remnants of the
lower vaulting, supported on low stout columns surmounted by the
crochet capital of the period. The two or three arches of these
vaults that were still in position were utilized by the adjoining
farmer as shelter for his calves, the floor being spread with
straw, amid which the young creatures rustled, cooling their
thirsty tongues by licking the quaint Norman carving, which
glistened with the moisture. It was a degradation of even such a
rude form of art as this to be treatad so grossly, she thought,
and for the first time the family of Fitzpiers assumed in her
imagination the hues of a melancholy romanticism.

It was soon time to drive home, and she traversed the distance
with a preoccupied mind. The idea of so modern a man in science
and aesthetics as the young surgeon springing out of relics so
ancient was a kind of novelty she had never before experienced.
The combination lent him a social and intellectual interest which
she dreaded, so much weight did it add to the strange influence he
exercised upon her whenever he came near her.

In an excitement which was not love, not ambition, rather a
fearful consciousness of hazard in the air, she awaited his
return.

Meanwhile her father was awaiting him also. In his house there
was an old work on medicine, published towards the end of the last
century, and to put himself in harmony with events Melbury spread
this work on his knees when he had done his day's business, and
read about Galen, Hippocrates, and Herophilus--of the dogmatic,
the empiric, the hermetical, and other sects of practitioners that
have arisen in history; and thence proceeded to the classification
of maladies and the rules for their treatment, as laid down in
this valuable book with absolute precision. Melbury regretted
that the treatise was so old, fearing that he might in consequence
be unable to hold as complete a conversation as he could wish with
Mr. Fitzpiers, primed, no doubt, with more recent discoveries.

The day of Fitzpiers's return arrived, and he sent to say that he
would call immediately. In the little time that was afforded for
putting the house in order the sweeping of Melbury's parlor was as
the sweeping of the parlor at the Interpreter's which wellnigh
choked the Pilgrim. At the end of it Mrs. Melbury sat down,
folded her hands and lips, and waited. Her husband restlessly
walked in and out from the timber-yard, stared at the interior of
the room, jerked out "ay, ay," and retreated again. Between four
and five Fitzpiers arrived, hitching his horse to the hook outside
the door.

As soon as he had walked in and perceived that Grace was not in
the room, he seemed to have a misgiving. Nothing less than her
actual presence could long keep him to the level of this
impassioned enterprise, and that lacking he appeared as one who
wished to retrace his steps.

He mechanically talked at what he considered a woodland matron's
level of thought till a rustling was heard on the stairs, and
Grace came in. Fitzpiers was for once as agitated as she. Over
and above the genuine emotion which she raised in his heart there
hung the sense that he was casting a die by impulse which he might
not have thrown by judgment.

Mr. Melbury was not in the room. Having to attend to matters in
the yard, he had delayed putting on his afternoon coat and
waistcoat till the doctor's appearance, when, not wishing to be
backward in receiving him, he entered the parlor hastily buttoning
up those garments. Grace's fastidiousness was a little distressed
that Fitzpiers should see by this action the strain his visit was
putting upon her father; and to make matters worse for her just
then, old Grammer seemed to have a passion for incessantly pumping
in the back kitchen, leaving the doors open so that the banging
and splashing were distinct above the parlor conversation.

Whenever the chat over the tea sank into pleasant desultoriness
Mr. Melbury broke in with speeches of labored precision on very
remote topics, as if he feared to let Fitzpiers's mind dwell
critically on the subject nearest the hearts of all. In truth a
constrained manner was natural enough in Melbury just now, for the
greatest interest of his life was reaching its crisis. Could the
real have been beheld instead of the corporeal merely, the corner
of the room in which he sat would have been filled with a form
typical of anxious suspense, large-eyed, tight-lipped, awaiting
the issue. That paternal hopes and fears so intense should be
bound up in the person of one child so peculiarly circumstanced,
and not have dispersed themselves over the larger field of a whole
family, involved dangerous risks to future happiness.

Fitzpiers did not stay more than an hour, but that time had
apparently advanced his sentiments towards Grace, once and for
all, from a vaguely liquescent to an organic shape. She would not
have accompanied him to the door in response to his whispered
"Come!" if her mother had not said in a matter-of-fact way, "Of
course, Grace; go to the door with Mr. Fitzpiers."  Accordingly
Grace went, both her parents remaining in the room. When the
young pair were in the great brick-floored hall the lover took the
girl's hand in his, drew it under his arm, and thus led her on to
the door, where he stealthily kissed her.

She broke from him trembling, blushed and turned aside, hardly
knowing how things had advanced to this. Fitzpiers drove off,
kissing his hand to her, and waving it to Melbury who was visible
through the window. Her father returned the surgeon's action with
a great flourish of his own hand and a satisfied smile.

The intoxication that Fitzpiers had, as usual, produced in Grace's
brain during the visit passed off somewhat with his withdrawal.
She felt like a woman who did not know what she had been doing for
the previous hour, but supposed with trepidation that the
afternoon's proceedings, though vague, had amounted to an
engagement between herself and the handsome, coercive,
irresistible Fitzpiers.

This visit was a type of many which followed it during the long
summer days of that year. Grace was borne along upon a stream of
reasonings, arguments, and persuasions, supplemented, it must be
added, by inclinations of her own at times. No woman is without
aspirations, which may be innocent enough within certain limits;
and Grace had been so trained socially, and educated
intellectually, as to see clearly enough a pleasure in the
position of wife to such a man as Fitzpiers. His material
standing of itself, either present or future, had little in it to
give her ambition, but the possibilities of a refined and
cultivated inner life, of subtle psychological intercourse, had
their charm. It was this rather than any vulgar idea of marrying
well which caused her to float with the current, and to yield to
the immense influence which Fitzpiers exercised over her whenever
she shared his society.

Any observer would shrewdly have prophesied that whether or not
she loved him as yet in the ordinary sense, she was pretty sure to
do so in time.

One evening just before dusk they had taken a rather long walk
together, and for a short cut homeward passed through the
shrubberies of Hintock House--still deserted, and still blankly
confronting with its sightless shuttered windows the surrounding
foliage and slopes. Grace was tired, and they approached the
wall, and sat together on one of the stone sills--still warm with
the sun that had been pouring its rays upon them all the
afternoon.

"This place would just do for us, would it not, dearest," said her
betrothed, as they sat, turning and looking idly at the old
facade.

"Oh yes," said Grace, plainly showing that no such fancy had ever
crossed her mind. "She is away from home still," Grace added in a
minute, rather sadly, for she could not forget that she had
somehow lost the valuable friendship of the lady of this bower.

"Who is?--oh, you mean Mrs. Charmond. Do you know, dear, that at
one time I thought you lived here."

"Indeed!" said Grace. "How was that?"

He explained, as far as he could do so without mentioning his
disappointment at finding it was otherwise; and then went on:
"Well, never mind that. Now I want to ask you something. There
is one detail of our wedding which I am sure you will leave to me.
My inclination is not to be married at the horrid little church
here, with all the yokels staring round at us, and a droning
parson reading."

"Where, then, can it be? At a church in town?"

"No. Not at a church at all. At a registry office. It is a
quieter, snugger, and more convenient place in every way."

"Oh," said she, with real distress. "How can I be married except
at church, and with all my dear friends round me?"

"Yeoman Winterborne among them."

"Yes--why not? You know there was nothing serious between him and
me "

"You see, dear, a noisy bell-ringing marriage at church has this
objection in our case: it would be a thing of report a long way
round. Now I would gently, as gently as possible, indicate to you
how inadvisable such publicity would be if we leave Hintock, and I
purchase the practice that I contemplate purchasing at Budmouth--
hardly more than twenty miles off. Forgive my saying that it will
be far better if nobody there knows where you come from, nor
anything about your parents. Your beauty and knowledge and
manners will carry you anywhere if you are not hampered by such
retrospective criticism."

"But could it not be a quiet ceremony, even at church?" she
pleaded.

"I don't see the necessity of going there!" he said, a trifle
impatiently. "Marriage is a civil contract, and the shorter and
simpler it is made the better. People don't go to church when
they take a house, or even when they make a will."

"Oh, Edgar--I don't like to hear you speak like that."

"Well, well--I didn't mean to. But I have mentioned as much to
your father, who has made no objection; and why should you?"

She gave way, deeming the point one on which she ought to allow
sentiment to give way to policy--if there were indeed policy in
his plan. But she was indefinably depressed as they walked
homeward.

CHAPTER XXIV.

He left her at the door of her father's house. As he receded, and
was clasped out of sight by the filmy shades, he impressed Grace
as a man who hardly appertained to her existence at all.
Cleverer, greater than herself, one outside her mental orbit, as
she considered him, he seemed to be her ruler rather than her
equal, protector, and dear familiar friend.

The disappointment she had experienced at his wish, the shock
given to her girlish sensibilities by his irreverent views of
marriage, together with the sure and near approach of the day
fixed for committing her future to his keeping, made her so
restless that she could scarcely sleep at all that night. She
rose when the sparrows began to walk out of the roof-holes, sat on
the floor of her room in the dim light, and by-and-by peeped out
behind the window-curtains. It was even now day out-of-doors,
though the tones of morning were feeble and wan, and it was long
before the sun would be perceptible in this overshadowed vale.
Not a sound came from any of the out-houses as yet. The tree-
trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore
that aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of
daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless
immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness; a
meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively
contrasting with her own active emotions. Beyond the road were
some cottage roofs and orchards; over these roofs and over the
apple-trees behind, high up the slope, and backed by the
plantation on the crest, was the house yet occupied by her future
husband, the rough-cast front showing whitely through its
creepers. The window-shutters were closed, the bedroom curtains
closely drawn, and not the thinnest coil of smoke rose from the
rugged chimneys.

Something broke the stillness. The front door of the house she
was gazing at opened softly, and there came out into the porch a
female figure, wrapped in a large shawl, beneath which was visible
the white skirt of a long loose garment. A gray arm, stretching
from within the porch, adjusted the shawl over the woman's
shoulders; it was withdrawn and disappeared, the door closing
behind her.

The woman went quickly down the box-edged path between the
raspberries and currants, and as she walked her well-developed
form and gait betrayed her individuality. It was Suke Damson, the
affianced one of simple young Tim Tangs. At the bottom of the
garden she entered the shelter of the tall hedge, and only the top
of her head could be seen hastening in the direction of her own
dwelling.

Grace had recognized, or thought she recognized, in the gray arm
stretching from the porch, the sleeve of a dressing-gown which Mr.
Fitzpiers had been wearing on her own memorable visit to him. Her
face fired red. She had just before thought of dressing herself
and taking a lonely walk under the trees, so coolly green this
early morning; but she now sat down on her bed and fell into
reverie. It seemed as if hardly any time had passed when she
heard the household moving briskly about, and breakfast preparing
down-stairs; though, on rousing herself to robe and descend, she
found that the sun was throwing his rays completely over the tree-
tops, a progress of natural phenomena denoting that at least three
hours had elapsed since she last looked out of the window.

When attired she searched about the house for her father; she
found him at last in the garden, stooping to examine the potatoes
for signs of disease. Hearing her rustle, he stood up and
stretched his back and arms, saying, "Morning t'ye, Gracie. I
congratulate ye. It is only a month to-day to the time!"

She did not answer, but, without lifting her dress, waded between
the dewy rows of tall potato-green into the middle of the plot
where he was.

"I have been thinking very much about my position this morning--
ever since it was light," she began, excitedly, and trembling so
that she could hardly stand. "And I feel it is a false one. I
wish not to marry Mr. Fitzpiers. I wish not to marry anybody; but
I'll marry Giles Winterborne if you say I must as an alternative."

Her father's face settled into rigidity, he turned pale, and came
deliberately out of the plot before he answered her. She had
never seen him look so incensed before.

"Now, hearken to me," he said. "There's a time for a woman to
alter her mind; and there's a time when she can no longer alter
it, if she has any right eye to her parents' honor and the
seemliness of things. That time has come. I won't say to ye, you
SHALL marry him. But I will say that if you refuse, I shall
forever be ashamed and a-weary of ye as a daughter, and shall look
upon you as the hope of my life no more. What do you know about
life and what it can bring forth, and how you ought to act to lead
up to best ends? Oh, you are an ungrateful maid, Grace; you've
seen that fellow Giles, and he has got over ye; that's where the
secret lies, I'll warrant me!"

"No, father, no! It is not Giles--it is something I cannot tell
you of--"

"Well, make fools of us all; make us laughing-stocks; break it
off; have your own way."

"But who knows of the engagement as yet? how can breaking it
disgrace you?"

Melbury then by degrees admitted that he had mentioned the
engagement to this acquaintance and to that, till she perceived
that in his restlessness and pride he had published it everywhere.
She went dismally away to a bower of laurel at the top of the
garden. Her father followed her.

"It is that Giles Winterborne!" he said, with an upbraiding gaze
at her.

"No, it is not; though for that matter you encouraged him once,"
she said, troubled to the verge of despair. "It is not Giles, it
is Mr. Fitzpiers."

"You've had a tiff--a lovers' tiff--that's all, I suppose

"It is some woman--"

"Ay, ay; you are jealous. The old story. Don't tell me. Now do
you bide here. I'll send Fitzpiers to you. I saw him smoking in
front of his house but a minute by-gone."

He went off hastily out of the garden-gate and down the lane. But
she would not stay where she was; and edging through a slit in the
garden-fence, walked away into the wood. Just about here the
trees were large and wide apart, and there was no undergrowth, so
that she could be seen to some distance; a sylph-like, greenish-
white creature, as toned by the sunlight and leafage. She heard a
foot-fall crushing dead leaves behind her, and found herself
reconnoitered by Fitzpiers himself, approaching gay and fresh as
the morning around them.

His remote gaze at her had been one of mild interest rather than
of rapture. But she looked so lovely in the green world about
her, her pink cheeks, her simple light dress, and the delicate
flexibility of her movement acquired such rarity from their wild-
wood setting, that his eyes kindled as he drew near.

"My darling, what is it? Your father says you are in the pouts,
and jealous, and I don't know what. Ha! ha! ha! as if there were
any rival to you, except vegetable nature, in this home of
recluses! We know better."

"Jealous; oh no, it is not so," said she, gravely. "That's a
mistake of his and yours, sir. I spoke to him so closely about
the question of marriage with you that he did not apprehend my
state of mind."

"But there's something wrong--eh?" he asked, eying her narrowly,
and bending to kiss her. She shrank away, and his purposed kiss
miscarried.

"What is it?" he said, more seriously for this little defeat.

She made no answer beyond, "Mr. Fitzpiers, I have had no
breakfast, I must go in."

"Come," he insisted, fixing his eyes upon her. "Tell me at once,
I say."

It was the greater strength against the smaller; but she was
mastered less by his manner than by her own sense of the
unfairness of silence. "I looked out of the window," she said,
with hesitation. "I'll tell you by-and-by. I must go in-doors.
I have had no breakfast."

By a sort of divination his conjecture went straight to the fact.
"Nor I," said he, lightly. "Indeed, I rose late to-day. I have
had a broken night, or rather morning. A girl of the village--I
don't know her name--came and rang at my bell as soon as it was
light--between four and five, I should think it was--perfectly
maddened with an aching tooth. As no-body heard her ring, she
threw some gravel at my window, till at last I heard her and
slipped on my dressing-gown and went down. The poor thing begged
me with tears in her eyes to take out her tormentor, if I dragged
her head off. Down she sat and out it came--a lovely molar, not a
speck upon it; and off she went with it in her handkerchief, much
contented, though it would have done good work for her for fifty
years to come."