The Woodlanders

"He ought to have married YOU, Marty, and nobody else in the world!"

said Grace, with conviction, after thinking somewhat in the above

strain.

Marty shook her head. "In all our out-door days and years together,

ma'am," she replied, "the one thing he never spoke of to me was love;

nor I to him."

"Yet you and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew--not even

my father, though he came nearest knowing--the tongue of the trees and

fruits and flowers themselves."

She could indulge in mournful fancies like this to Marty; but the hard

core to her grief--which Marty's had not--remained. Had she been sure

that Giles's death resulted entirely from his exposure, it would have

driven her well-nigh to insanity; but there was always that bare

possibility that his exposure had only precipitated what was

inevitable. She longed to believe that it had not done even this.

There was only one man whose opinion on the circumstances she would be

at all disposed to trust. Her husband was that man. Yet to ask him it

would be necessary to detail the true conditions in which she and

Winterborne had lived during these three or four critical days that

followed her flight; and in withdrawing her original defiant

announcement on that point, there seemed a weakness she did not care to

show. She never doubted that Fitzpiers would believe her if she made a

clean confession of the actual situation; but to volunteer the

correction would seem like signalling for a truce, and that, in her

present frame of mind, was what she did not feel the need of.

It will probably not appear a surprising statement, after what has been

already declared of Fitzpiers, that the man whom Grace's fidelity could

not keep faithful was stung into passionate throbs of interest

concerning her by her avowal of the contrary.

He declared to himself that he had never known her dangerously full

compass if she were capable of such a reprisal; and, melancholy as it

may be to admit the fact, his own humiliation and regret engendered a

smouldering admiration of her.

He passed a month or two of great misery at Exbury, the place to which

he had retired--quite as much misery indeed as Grace, could she have

known of it, would have been inclined to inflict upon any living

creature, how much soever he might have wronged her. Then a sudden

hope dawned upon him; he wondered if her affirmation were true. He

asked himself whether it were not the act of a woman whose natural

purity and innocence had blinded her to the contingencies of such an

announcement. His wide experience of the sex had taught him that, in

many cases, women who ventured on hazardous matters did so because they

lacked an imagination sensuous enough to feel their full force. In

this light Grace's bold avowal might merely have denoted the

desperation of one who was a child to the realities of obliquity.