The Woodlanders

Melbury, after much alarm and consideration, had decided not to follow

her either. He sympathized with her flight, much as he deplored it;

moreover, the tragic color of the antecedent events that he had been a

great means of creating checked his instinct to interfere. He prayed

and trusted that she had got into no danger on her way (as he supposed)

to Sherton, and thence to Exbury, if that were the place she had gone

to, forbearing all inquiry which the strangeness of her departure would

have made natural. A few months before this time a performance by

Grace of one-tenth the magnitude of this would have aroused him to

unwonted investigation.

It was in the same spirit that he had tacitly assented to Fitzpiers's

domicilation there. The two men had not met face to face, but Mrs.

Melbury had proposed herself as an intermediary, who made the surgeon's

re-entrance comparatively easy to him. Everything was provisional, and

nobody asked questions. Fitzpiers had come in the performance of a

plan of penitence, which had originated in circumstances hereafter to

be explained; his self-humiliation to the very bass-string was

deliberate; and as soon as a call reached him from the bedside of a

dying man his desire was to set to work and do as much good as he could

with the least possible fuss or show. He therefore refrained from

calling up a stableman to get ready any horse or gig, and set out for

One-chimney Hut on foot, as Grace had done.