Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been starved off
by Edgar Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating bare and undiluted
manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready to hand. This was an
excursion of the imagination which she did not encourage, and she said
suddenly, to disguise the confused regard which had followed her
thoughts, "Did you meet my husband?"
Winterborne, with some hesitation, "Yes."
"Where did you meet him?"
"At Calfhay Cross. I come from Middleton Abbey; I have been making
there for the last week."
"Haven't they a mill of their own?"
"Yes, but it's out of repair."
"I think--I heard that Mrs. Charmond had gone there to stay?"
"Yes. I have seen her at the windows once or twice."
Grace waited an interval before she went on: "Did Mr. Fitzpiers take
the way to Middleton?"
"Yes...I met him on Darling." As she did not reply, he added, with a
gentler inflection, "You know why the mare was called that?"
"Oh yes--of course," she answered, quickly.
They had risen so far over the crest of the hill that the whole west
sky was revealed. Between the broken clouds they could see far into
the recesses of heaven, the eye journeying on under a species of golden
arcades, and past fiery obstructions, fancied cairns, logan-stones,
stalactites and stalagmite of topaz. Deeper than this their gaze
passed thin flakes of incandescence, till it plunged into a bottomless
medium of soft green fire.
Her abandonment to the luscious time after her sense of ill-usage, her
revolt for the nonce against social law, her passionate desire for
primitive life, may have showed in her face. Winterborne was looking
at her, his eyes lingering on a flower that she wore in her bosom.
Almost with the abstraction of a somnambulist he stretched out his hand
and gently caressed the flower.
She drew back. "What are you doing, Giles Winterborne!" she exclaimed,
with a look of severe surprise. The evident absence of all
premeditation from the act, however, speedily led her to think that it
was not necessary to stand upon her dignity here and now. "You must
bear in mind, Giles," she said, kindly, "that we are not as we were;
and some people might have said that what you did was taking a liberty."
It was more than she need have told him; his action of forgetfulness
had made him so angry with himself that he flushed through his tan. "I
don't know what I am coming to!" he exclaimed, savagely. "Ah--I was
not once like this!" Tears of vexation were in his eyes.