nto an aspect of deep distress when she saw what had
happened. "Oh no, Giles," she said, with extreme pathos; "certainly
not. Why do you--say that when you know better? You EVER will
misunderstand me."

"Indeed, that's not so, Mrs. Fitzpiers. Can you deny that you felt out
of place at The Three Tuns?"

"I don't know. Well, since you make me speak, I do not deny it."

"And yet I have felt at home there these twenty years. Your husband
used always to take you to the Earl of Wessex, did he not?"

"Yes," she reluctantly admitted. How could she explain in the street
of a market-town that it was her superficial and transitory taste which
had been offended, and not her nature or her affection? Fortunately, or
unfortunately, at that moment they saw Melbury's man driving vacantly
along the street in search of her, the hour having passed at which he
had been told to take her up. Winterborne hailed him, and she was
powerless then to prolong the discourse. She entered the vehicle
sadly, and the horse trotted away.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

All night did Winterborne think over that unsatisfactory ending of a
pleasant time, forgetting the pleasant time itself. He feared anew
that they could never be happy together, even should she be free to
choose him. She was accomplished; he was unrefined. It was the
original difficulty, which he was too sensitive to recklessly ignore,
as some men would have done in his place.

He was one of those silent, unobtrusive beings who want little from
others in the way of favor or condescension, and perhaps on that very
account scrutinize those others' behavior too closely. He was not
versatile, but one in whom a hope or belief which had once had its
rise, meridian, and decline seldom again exactly recurred, as in the
breasts of more sanguine mortals. He had once worshipped her, laid out
his life to suit her, wooed her, and lost her. Though it was with
almost the same zest, it was with not quite the same hope, that he had
begun to tread the old tracks again, and allowed himself to be so
charmed with her that day.

Move another step towards her he would not. He would even repulse
her--as a tribute to conscience. It would be sheer sin to let her
prepare a pitfall for her happiness not much smaller than the first by
inveigling her into a union with such as he. Her poor father was now
blind to these subtleties, which he had formerly beheld as in noontide
light. It was his own duty to de