“And I’ll do my best not to see him. I am his slave; but I’ll try.”
Grace was naturally kind; but she could not help using a small dagger now.
“Pray don’t distress yourself,” she said, with exquisitely fine scorn. “You may keep him—for me.” Had she been wounded instead of mortified she could not have used the words; but Fitzpiers’s hold upon her heart was slight.
They parted thus and there, and Grace went moodily homeward. Passing Marty’s cottage she observed through the window that the girl was writing instead of chopping as usual, and wondered what her correspondence could be. Directly afterwards she met people in search of her, and reached the house to find all in serious alarm. She soon explained that she had lost her way, and her general depression was attributed to exhaustion on that account.
Could she have known what Marty was writing she would have been surprised.
The rumor which agitated the other folk of Hintock had reached the young girl, and she was penning a letter to Fitzpiers, to tell him that Mrs. Charmond wore her hair. It was poor Marty’s only card, and she played it, knowing nothing of fashion, and thinking her revelation a fatal one for a lover.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
It was at the beginning of April, a few days after the meeting between Grace and Mrs. Charmond in the wood, that Fitzpiers, just returned from London, was travelling from Sherton-Abbas to Hintock in a hired carriage. In his eye there was a doubtful light, and the lines of his refined face showed a vague disquietude. He appeared now like one of those who impress the beholder as having suffered wrong in being born.
His position was in truth gloomy, and to his appreciative mind it seemed even gloomier than it was. His practice had been slowly dwindling of late, and now threatened to die out altogether, the irrepressible old Dr. Jones capturing patients up to Fitzpiers’s very door. Fitzpiers knew only too well the latest and greatest cause of his unpopularity; and yet, so illogical is man, the second branch of his sadness grew out of a remedial measure proposed for the first—a letter from Felice Charmond imploring him not to see her again. To bring about their severance still more effectually, she added, she had decided during his absence upon almost immediate departure for the Continent.
The time was that dull interval in a woodlander’s life which coincides with great activity in the life of the woodland itself—a period following the close of the winter tree-cutting, and preceding the barking season, when the saps are just beginning to heave with the force of hydraulic lifts inside all the trunks of the forest.