face. The one intolerable condition, the condition she had deprecated
above all others, was that of Fitzpiers's reinstatement there. "Oh, I
won't, I won't see him," she said, sinking down. She was almost
hysterical.

"Try if you cannot," he returned, moodily.

"Oh yes, I will, I will," she went on, inconsequently. "I'll try;" and
jumping up suddenly, she left the room.

In the darkness of the apartment to which she flew nothing could have
been seen during the next half-hour; but from a corner a quick
breathing was audible from this impressible creature, who combined
modern nerves with primitive emotions, and was doomed by such
coexistence to be numbered among the distressed, and to take her
scourgings to their exquisite extremity.

The window was open. On this quiet, late summer evening, whatever
sound arose in so secluded a district--the chirp of a bird, a call from
a voice, the turning of a wheel--extended over bush and tree to
unwonted distances. Very few sounds did arise. But as Grace invisibly
breathed in the brown glooms of the chamber, the small remote noise of
light wheels came in to her, accompanied by the trot of a horse on the
turnpike-road. There seemed to be a sudden hitch or pause in the
progress of the vehicle, which was what first drew her attention to it.
She knew the point whence the sound proceeded--the hill-top over which
travellers passed on their way hitherward from Sherton Abbas--the place
at which she had emerged from the wood with Mrs. Charmond. Grace slid
along the floor, and bent her head over the window-sill, listening with
open lips. The carriage had stopped, and she heard a man use
exclamatory words. Then another said, "What the devil is the matter
with the horse?" She recognized the voice as her husband's.

The accident, such as it had been, was soon remedied, and the carriage
could be heard descending the hill on the Hintock side, soon to turn
into the lane leading out of the highway, and then into the "drong"
which led out of the lane to the house where she was.

A spasm passed through Grace. The Daphnean instinct, exceptionally
strong in her as a girl, had been revived by her widowed seclusion; and
it was not lessened by her affronted sentiments towards the comer, and
her regard for another man. She opened some little ivory tablets that
lay on the dressing-table, scribbled in pencil on one of them, "I am
gone to visit one of my school-friends," gathered a few toilet