urprise 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