Perhaps Winterborne was not quite so ardent as heretofore. There is no
such thing as a stationary love: men are either loving more or loving
less. But Giles himself recognized no decline in his sense of her
dearness. If the flame did indeed burn lower now than when he had
fetched her from Sherton at her last return from school, the marvel was
small. He had been laboring ever since his rejection and her marriage
to reduce his former passion to a docile friendship, out of pure regard
to its expediency; and their separation may have helped him to a
partial success.
A week and more passed, and there was no further news of Melbury. But
the effect of the intelligence he had already transmitted upon the
elastic-nerved daughter of the woods had been much what the old surgeon
Jones had surmised. It had soothed her perturbed spirit better than
all the opiates in the pharmacopoeia. She had slept unbrokenly a whole
night and a day. The "new law" was to her a mysterious, beneficent,
godlike entity, lately descended upon earth, that would make her as she
once had been without trouble or annoyance. Her position fretted her,
its abstract features rousing an aversion which was even greater than
her aversion to the personality of him who had caused it. It was
mortifying, productive of slights, undignified. Him she could forget;
her circumstances she had always with her.
She saw nothing of Winterborne during the days of her recovery; and
perhaps on that account her fancy wove about him a more romantic tissue
than it could have done if he had stood before her with all the specks
and flaws inseparable from corporeity. He rose upon her memory as the
fruit-god and the wood-god in alternation; sometimes leafy, and smeared
with green lichen, as she had seen him among the sappy boughs of the
plantations; sometimes cider-stained, and with apple-pips in the hair
of his arms, as she had met him on his return from cider-making in
White Hart Vale, with his vats and presses beside him. In her secret
heart she almost approximated to her father's enthusiasm in wishing to
show Giles once for all how she still regarded him. The question
whether the future would indeed bring them together for life was a
standing wonder with her. She knew that it could not with any
propriety do so just yet. But reverently believing in her father's
sound judgment and knowledge, as good girls are wont to do, she
remembered what he had written about her giving a hint to Winterborne
lest there should be risk in delay, and her feelings were not averse to
such a step, so far as it could be done without danger at this early
stage of the proceedings.