The Woodlanders

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.