ssion for
isolation, induced by a fit of Achillean moodiness after an imagined
slight. His wife herself saw the awkwardness of their position here,
and cheerfully welcomed the purposed change, towards which every step
had been taken but the last. But could he find it in his heart--as he
found it clearly enough in his conscience--to go away?

He drew a troubled breath, and went in-doors. Here he rapidly penned a
letter, wherein he withdrew once for all from the treaty for the
Budmouth practice. As the postman had already left Little Hintock for
that night, he sent one of Melbury's men to intercept a mail-cart on
another turnpike-road, and so got the letter off.

The man returned, met Fitzpiers in the lane, and told him the thing was
done. Fitzpiers went back to his house musing. Why had he carried out
this impulse--taken such wild trouble to effect a probable injury to
his own and his young wife's prospects? His motive was fantastic,
glowing, shapeless as the fiery scenery about the western sky. Mrs.
Charmond could overtly be nothing more to him than a patient now, and
to his wife, at the outside, a patron. In the unattached bachelor days
of his first sojourning here how highly proper an emotional reason for
lingering on would have appeared to troublesome dubiousness.
Matrimonial ambition is such an honorable thing.

"My father has told me that you have sent off one of the men with a
late letter to Budmouth," cried Grace, coming out vivaciously to meet
him under the declining light of the sky, wherein hung, solitary, the
folding star. "I said at once that you had finally agreed to pay the
premium they ask, and that the tedious question had been settled. When
do we go, Edgar?"

"I have altered my mind," said he. "They want too much--seven hundred
and fifty is too large a sum--and in short, I have declined to go
further. We must wait for another opportunity. I fear I am not a good
business-man." He spoke the last words with a momentary faltering at
the great foolishness of his act; for, as he looked in her fair and
honorable face, his heart reproached him for what he had done.

Her manner that evening showed her disappointment. Personally she
liked the home of her childhood much, and she was not ambitious. But
her husband had seemed so dissatisfied with the circumstances hereabout
since their marriage that she had sincerely hoped to go for his sake.

It was two or three days before he visited Mrs. Charm