Grace as her father might, she would admit nothing. For the
present, therefore, he simply watched.

The suspicion that his darling child was being slighted wrought almost
a miraculous change in Melbury's nature. No man so furtive for the
time as the ingenuous countryman who finds that his ingenuousness has
been abused. Melbury's heretofore confidential candor towards his
gentlemanly son-in-law was displaced by a feline stealth that did
injury to his every action, thought, and mood. He knew that a woman
once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and
made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first
time he asked himself why this so generally should be so. Moreover,
this case was not, he argued, like ordinary cases. Leaving out the
question of Grace being anything but an ordinary woman, her peculiar
situation, as it were in mid-air between two planes of society,
together with the loneliness of Hintock, made a husband's neglect a far
more tragical matter to her than it would be to one who had a large
circle of friends to fall back upon. Wisely or unwisely, and whatever
other fathers did, he resolved to fight his daughter's battle still.

Mrs. Charmond had returned. But Hintock House scarcely gave forth
signs of life, so quietly had she reentered it. He went to church at
Great Hintock one afternoon as usual, there being no service at the
smaller village. A few minutes before his departure, he had casually
heard Fitzpiers, who was no church-goer, tell his wife that he was
going to walk in the wood. Melbury entered the building and sat down
in his pew; the parson came in, then Mrs. Charmond, then Mr. Fitzpiers.

The service proceeded, and the jealous father was quite sure that a
mutual consciousness was uninterruptedly maintained between those two;
he fancied that more than once their eyes met. At the end, Fitzpiers
so timed his movement into the aisle that it exactly coincided with
Felice Charmond's from the opposite side, and they walked out with
their garments in contact, the surgeon being just that two or three
inches in her rear which made it convenient for his eyes to rest upon
her cheek. The cheek warmed up to a richer tone.

This was a worse feature in the flirtation than he had expected. If she
had been playing with him in an idle freak the game might soon have
wearied her; but the smallest germ of passion--and women of the world
do not change color for nothin