The Woodlanders

Herr Tannhauser still moved on, his plodding steed rendering him

distinctly visible yet. Could she have heard Fitzpiers's voice at that

moment she would have found him murmuring-"...Towards the loadstar of my one desire

I flitted, even as a dizzy moth in the owlet light."

But he was a silent spectacle to her now. Soon he rose out of the

valley, and skirted a high plateau of the chalk formation on his right,

which rested abruptly upon the fruity district of loamy clay, the

character and herbage of the two formations being so distinct that the

calcareous upland appeared but as a deposit of a few years' antiquity

upon the level vale. He kept along the edge of this high, unenclosed

country, and the sky behind him being deep violet, she could still see

white Darling in relief upon it--a mere speck now--a Wouvermans

eccentricity reduced to microscopic dimensions. Upon this high ground

he gradually disappeared.

Thus she had beheld the pet animal purchased for her own use, in pure

love of her, by one who had always been true, impressed to convey her

husband away from her to the side of a new-found idol. While she was

musing on the vicissitudes of horses and wives, she discerned shapes

moving up the valley towards her, quite near at hand, though till now

hidden by the hedges. Surely they were Giles Winterborne, with his two

horses and cider-apparatus, conducted by Robert Creedle. Up, upward

they crept, a stray beam of the sun alighting every now and then like a

star on the blades of the pomace-shovels, which had been converted to

steel mirrors by the action of the malic acid. She opened the gate

when he came close, and the panting horses rested as they achieved the

ascent.

"How do you do, Giles?" said she, under a sudden impulse to be familiar

with him.

He replied with much more reserve. "You are going for a walk, Mrs.

Fitzpiers?" he added. "It is pleasant just now."

"No, I am returning," said she.

The vehicles passed through, the gate slammed, and Winterborne walked

by her side in the rear of the apple-mill.

He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt

to wheat-color, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his boots and leggings

dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of

apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that

atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an

indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among

the orchards. Her heart rose from its late sadness like a released

spring; her senses revelled in the sudden lapse back to nature

unadorned. The consciousness of having to be genteel because of her

husband's profession, the veneer of artificiality which she had

acquired at the fashionable schools, were thrown off, and she became

the crude, country girl of her latent, earliest instincts.