nt as if we lived elsewhere."

"Certainly, Edgar--I quite see that it must be so."

"But you joined in with all those people in my absence, without knowing
whether I should approve or disapprove. When I came I couldn't help
myself at all."

She, sighing: "Yes--I see I ought to have waited; though they came
unexpectedly, and I thought I had acted for the best."

Thus the discussion ended, and the next day Fitzpiers went on his old
rounds as usual. But it was easy for so super-subtle an eye as his to
discern, or to think he discerned, that he was no longer regarded as an
extrinsic, unfathomed gentleman of limitless potentiality, scientific
and social; but as Mr. Melbury's compeer, and therefore in a degree
only one of themselves. The Hintock woodlandlers held with all the
strength of inherited conviction to the aristocratic principle, and as
soon as they had discovered that Fitzpiers was one of the old Buckbury
Fitzpierses they had accorded to him for nothing a touching of
hat-brims, promptness of service, and deference of approach, which
Melbury had to do without, though he paid for it over and over. But
now, having proved a traitor to his own cause by this marriage,
Fitzpiers was believed in no more as a superior hedged by his own
divinity; while as doctor he began to be rated no higher than old
Jones, whom they had so long despised.

His few patients seemed in his two months' absence to have dwindled
considerably in number, and no sooner had he returned than there came
to him from the Board of Guardians a complaint that a pauper had been
neglected by his substitute. In a fit of pride Fitzpiers resigned his
appointment as one of the surgeons to the union, which had been the
nucleus of his practice here.

At the end of a fortnight he came in-doors one evening to Grace more
briskly than usual. "They have written to me again about that practice
in Budmouth that I once negotiated for," he said to her. "The premium
asked is eight hundred pounds, and I think that between your father and
myself it ought to be raised. Then we can get away from this place
forever."

The question had been mooted between them before, and she was not
unprepared to consider it. They had not proceeded far with the
discussion when a knock came to the door, and in a minute Grammer ran
up to say that a message had arrived from Hintock House requesting Dr.
Fitzpiers to attend there at once. Mrs. Charmond had met with a slight
accident