plan of setting out for a long term
of travel and residence on the Continent. She went off one morning as
unostentatiously as could be, and took no maid with her, having, she
said, engaged one to meet her at a point farther on in her route.
After that, Hintock House, so frequently deserted, was again to be let.
Spring had not merged in summer when a clinching rumor, founded on the
best of evidence, reached the parish and neighborhood. Mrs. Charmond
and Fitzpiers had been seen together in Baden, in relations which set
at rest the question that had agitated the little community ever since
the winter.

Melbury had entered the Valley of Humiliation even farther than Grace.
His spirit seemed broken.

But once a week he mechanically went to market as usual, and here, as
he was passing by the conduit one day, his mental condition expressed
largely by his gait, he heard his name spoken by a voice formerly
familiar. He turned and saw a certain Fred Beaucock--once a promising
lawyer's clerk and local dandy, who had been called the cleverest
fellow in Sherton, without whose brains the firm of solicitors
employing him would be nowhere. But later on Beaucock had fallen into
the mire. He was invited out a good deal, sang songs at agricultural
meetings and burgesses' dinners; in sum, victualled himself with
spirits more frequently than was good for the clever brains or body
either. He lost his situation, and after an absence spent in trying
his powers elsewhere, came back to his native town, where, at the time
of the foregoing events in Hintock, he gave legal advice for
astonishingly small fees--mostly carrying on his profession on
public-house settles, in whose recesses he might often have been
overheard making country-people's wills for half a crown; calling with
a learned voice for pen-and-ink and a halfpenny sheet of paper, on
which he drew up the testament while resting it in a little space wiped
with his hand on the table amid the liquid circles formed by the cups
and glasses. An idea implanted early in life is difficult to uproot,
and many elderly tradespeople still clung to the notion that Fred
Beaucock knew a great deal of law.

It was he who had called Melbury by name. "You look very down, Mr.
Melbury--very, if I may say as much," he observed, when the
timber-merchant turned. "But I know--I know. A very sad case--very.
I was bred to the law, as you know, and am professionally no stranger
to such matters. Well