front of him.

Her indefinite, idle, impossible passion for Fitzpiers; her
constitutional cloud of misery; the sorrowful drops that still hung
upon her eyelashes, all made way for the incursive mood started by the
spectacle. She burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, her very
gloom of the previous hour seeming to render it the more
uncontrollable. It had not died out of her when she reached the
dining-room; and even here, before the servants, her shoulders suddenly
shook as the scene returned upon her; and the tears of her hilarity
mingled with the remnants of those engendered by her grief.

She resolved to be sad no more. She drank two glasses of champagne,
and a little more still after those, and amused herself in the evening
with singing little amatory songs.

"I must do something for that poor man Winterborne, however," she said.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A week had passed, and Mrs. Charmond had left Hintock House. Middleton
Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles distant by
road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways.

Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless, that
at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous civility
of mere acquaintanceship crept into his manner; yet, when sitting at
meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks. Her little doings
interested him no longer, while towards her father his bearing was not
far from supercilious. It was plain that his mind was entirely outside
her life, whereabouts outside it she could not tell; in some region of
science, possibly, or of psychological literature. But her hope that
he was again immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her
marriage had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply
on the slender fact that he often sat up late.

One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down Hill,
the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and which opened
on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into Blackmoor Vale, or
the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath the eye at this point to
a distance of many miles. His attention was fixed on the landscape far
away, and Grace's approach was so noiseless that he did not hear her.
When she came close she could see his lips moving unconsciously, as to
some impassioned visionary theme.

She spoke, and Fitzpiers started. "What are you looking at?" she asked.

"Oh! I was contemplating our old place of