ft 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 re