“Yes, father,” she murmured.
“Waiting for your dear husband?” he inquired, speaking with the sarcasm of pitiful affection.
“Oh no—not especially. He has a great many patients to see this afternoon.”
Melbury came quite close. “Grace, what’s the use of talking like that, when you know—Here, come down and walk with me out in the garden, child.”
He unfastened the door in the ivy-laced wall, and waited. This apparent indifference alarmed him. He would far rather that she had rushed in all the fire of jealousy to Hintock House, regardless of conventionality, confronted and attacked Felice Charmond unguibus et rostro, and accused her even in exaggerated shape of stealing away her husband. Such a storm might have cleared the air.
She emerged in a minute or two, and they went inside together. “You know as well as I do,” he resumed, “that there is something threatening mischief to your life; and yet you pretend you do not. Do you suppose I don’t see the trouble in your face every day? I am very sure that this quietude is wrong conduct in you. You should look more into matters.”
“I am quiet because my sadness is not of a nature to stir me to action.”
Melbury wanted to ask her a dozen questions—did she not feel jealous? was she not indignant? but a natural delicacy restrained him. “You are very tame and let-alone, I am bound to say,” he remarked, pointedly.
“I am what I feel, father,” she repeated.
He glanced at her, and there returned upon his mind the scene of her offering to wed Winterborne instead of Fitzpiers in the last days before her marriage; and he asked himself if it could be the fact that she loved Winterborne, now that she had lost him, more than she had ever done when she was comparatively free to choose him.