Why did Mrs. Dollery's van, instead of passing along at the end of the
smaller village to Great Hintock direct, turn one Saturday night into
Little Hintock Lane, and never pull up till it reached Mr. Melbury's
gates? The gilding shine of evening fell upon a large, flat box not
less than a yard square, and safely tied with cord, as it was handed
out from under the tilt with a great deal of care. But it was not
heavy for its size; Mrs. Dollery herself carried it into the house.
Tim Tangs, the hollow-turner, Bawtree, Suke Damson, and others, looked
knowing, and made remarks to each other as they watched its entrance.
Melbury stood at the door of the timber-shed in the attitude of a man
to whom such an arrival was a trifling domestic detail with which he
did not condescend to be concerned. Yet he well divined the contents
of that box, and was in truth all the while in a pleasant exaltation at
the proof that thus far, at any rate, no disappointment had supervened.
While Mrs. Dollery remained--which was rather long, from her sense of
the importance of her errand--he went into the out-house; but as soon
as she had had her say, been paid, and had rumbled away, he entered the
dwelling, to find there what he knew he should find--his wife and
daughter in a flutter of excitement over the wedding-gown, just arrived
from the leading dress-maker of Sandbourne watering-place aforesaid.
During these weeks Giles Winterborne was nowhere to be seen or heard
of. At the close of his tenure in Hintock he had sold some of his
furniture, packed up the rest--a few pieces endeared by associations,
or necessary to his occupation--in the house of a friendly neighbor,
and gone away. People said that a certain laxity had crept into his
life; that he had never gone near a church latterly, and had been
sometimes seen on Sundays with unblacked boots, lying on his elbow
under a tree, with a cynical gaze at surrounding objects. He was
likely to return to Hintock when the cider-making season came round,
his apparatus being stored there, and travel with his mill and press
from village to village.
The narrow interval that stood before the day diminished yet. There was
in Grace's mind sometimes a certain anticipative satisfaction, the
satisfaction of feeling that she would be the heroine of an hour;
moreover, she was proud, as a cultivated woman, to be the wife of a
cultivated man. It was an opportunity denied very frequently to young
women in her position, nowadays not a few; those in whom parental
discovery of the value of education has implanted tastes which parental
circles fail to gratify. But what an attenuation was this cold pride
of the dream of her youth, in which she had pictured herself walking in
state towards the altar, flushed by the purple light and bloom of her
own passion, without a single misgiving as to the sealing of the bond,
and fervently receiving as her due "The homage of a thousand hearts; the fond, deep love of one."