as to Fitzpiers, poor and hampered as he had become,
to recognize his real conquest of this beauty, delayed so many years.
His was the selfish passion of Congreve's Millamont, to whom love's
supreme delight lay in "that heart which others bleed for, bleed for
me."

When the horse had been attended to Melbury stood uneasily here and
there about his premises; he was rudely disturbed in the comfortable
views which had lately possessed him on his domestic concerns. It is
true that he had for some days discerned that Grace more and more
sought his company, preferred supervising his kitchen and bakehouse
with her step-mother to occupying herself with the lighter details of
her own apartments. She seemed no longer able to find in her own
hearth an adequate focus for her life, and hence, like a weak queen-bee
after leading off to an independent home, had hovered again into the
parent hive. But he had not construed these and other incidents of the
kind till now.

Something was wrong in the dove-cot. A ghastly sense that he alone
would be responsible for whatever unhappiness should be brought upon
her for whom he almost solely lived, whom to retain under his roof he
had faced the numerous inconveniences involved in giving up the best
part of his house to Fitzpiers. There was no room for doubt that, had
he allowed events to take their natural course, she would have accepted
Winterborne, and realized his old dream of restitution to that young
man's family.

That Fitzpiers could allow himself to look on any other creature for a
moment than Grace filled Melbury with grief and astonishment. In the
pure and simple life he had led it had scarcely occurred to him that
after marriage a man might be faithless. That he could sweep to the
heights of Mrs. Charmond's position, lift the veil of Isis, so to
speak, would have amazed Melbury by its audacity if he had not
suspected encouragement from that quarter. What could he and his
simple Grace do to countervail the passions of such as those two
sophisticated beings--versed in the world's ways, armed with every
apparatus for victory? In such an encounter the homely timber-dealer
felt as inferior as a bow-and-arrow savage before the precise weapons
of modern warfare.

Grace came out of the house as the morning drew on. The village was
silent, most of the folk having gone to the fair. Fitzpiers had
retired to bed, and was sleeping off his fatigue. She went to the
stable and look