encounter, and that the provocation he had received had lain entirely
in hearing her despised. But it would have greatly distressed her, and
he forbore. "You had better lie down. You are tired," he said,
soothingly. "Good-night."

The household went to bed, and a silence fell upon the dwelling, broken
only by the occasional skirr of a halter in Melbury's stables. Despite
her father's advice Grace still waited up. But nobody came.

It was a critical time in Grace's emotional life that night. She
thought of her husband a good deal, and for the nonce forgot
Winterborne.

"How these unhappy women must have admired Edgar!" she said to herself.
"How attractive he must be to everybody; and, indeed, he is
attractive." The possibility is that, piqued by rivalry, these ideas
might have been transformed into their corresponding emotions by a show
of the least reciprocity in Fitzpiers. There was, in truth, a
love-bird yearning to fly from her heart; and it wanted a lodging badly.

But no husband came. The fact was that Melbury had been much mistaken
about the condition of Fitzpiers. People do not fall headlong on
stumps of underwood with impunity. Had the old man been able to watch
Fitzpiers narrowly enough, he would have observed that on rising and
walking into the thicket he dropped blood as he went; that he had not
proceeded fifty yards before he showed signs of being dizzy, and,
raising his hands to his head, reeled and fell down.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Grace was not the only one who watched and meditated in Hintock that
night. Felice Charmond was in no mood to retire to rest at a customary
hour; and over her drawing-room fire at the Manor House she sat as
motionless and in as deep a reverie as Grace in her little apartment at
the homestead.

Having caught ear of Melbury's intelligence while she stood on the
landing at his house, and been eased of much of her mental distress,
her sense of personal decorum returned upon her with a rush. She
descended the stairs and left the door like a ghost, keeping close to
the walls of the building till she got round to the gate of the
quadrangle, through which she noiselessly passed almost before Grace
and her father had finished their discourse. Suke Damson had thought it
well to imitate her superior in this respect, and, descending the back
stairs as Felice descended the front, went out at the side door and
home to her cottage.

Once outside Melbury's gates Mrs. Charmo