her own hasty doings. She had tried to persuade
herself that he might have died of his illness, even if she had not
taken possession of his house. Sometimes she succeeded in her attempt;
sometimes she did not.

They stood by the grave together, and though the sun had gone down,
they could see over the woodland for miles, and down to the vale in
which he had been accustomed to descend every year, with his portable
mill and press, to make cider about this time.

Perhaps Grace's first grief, the discovery that if he had lived he
could never have claimed her, had some power in softening this, the
second. On Marty's part there was the same consideration; never would
she have been his. As no anticipation of gratified affection had been
in existence while he was with them, there was none to be disappointed
now that he had gone.

Grace was abased when, by degrees, she found that she had never
understood Giles as Marty had done. Marty South alone, of all the
women in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne's level
of intelligent intercourse with nature. In that respect she had formed
the complement to him in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart,
had subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.

The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that
wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with
these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of
its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read
its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of
night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace
a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple
occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They
had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had,
with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and
symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together
made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces,
when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the
species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the
wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort
afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or
tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the
stratum that had been reached by its r