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With this Fitzpiers was compelled to be satisfied, and he asked her when she would meet him again. "As we arranged in a fortnight." "If it must be a fortnight it must!" "This time at least. I'll consider by the day I see you again if I can shorten the interval." "Well, be that as it may, I shall come at least twice a week to look at your window." "You must do as you like about that. Good-night."
"It might have been a crime, but for the mercy of Providence in providing leaves for his fall," he said to himself. And then his mind reverted to the words of Fitzpiers, and his indignation so mounted within him that he almost wished the fall had put an end to the young man there and then. He had not ridden far when he discerned his own gray mare standing under some bushes.
"Then he's detained somewhere else," said Grace. "Never mind me; he will soon be home. I expect him about one." She went back to her room, and dozed and woke several times. One o'clock had been the hour of his return on the last occasion; but it passed now by a long way, and Fitzpiers did not come.
Melbury regretted that the treatise was so old, fearing that he might in consequence be unable to hold as complete a conversation as he could wish with Mr. Fitzpiers, primed, no doubt, with more recent discoveries. The day of Fitzpiers's return arrived, and he sent to say that he would call immediately.
He had entered by the bridle-gate which admitted to the park on this side, and cantered over the soft turf almost in the tracks of Fitzpiers's horse, till he reached the clump of trees under which his precursor had halted. The whitish object that was indistinctly visible here in the gloom of the boughs he found to be Darling, as left by Fitzpiers.
Grace, thinking that Winterborne saw her write, made no further sign, and the frail bark of fidelity that she had thus timidly launched was stranded and lost. Dr. Fitzpiers lived on the slope of the hill, in a house of much less pretension, both as to architecture and as to magnitude, than the timber-merchant's.
She wondered if this patronizing lady would return to Hintock during the summer, and whether the acquaintance which had been nipped on the last occasion of her residence there would develop on the next. Melbury told ancient timber-stories as he sat, relating them directly to Fitzpiers, and obliquely to the men, who had heard them often before.
The barking season had just commenced, and what he had heard was the tear of the ripping tool as it ploughed its way along the sticky parting between the trunk and the rind. Melbury did a large business in bark, and as he was Grace's father, and possibly might be found on the spot, Fitzpiers was attracted to the scene even more than he might have been by its intrinsic interest.
Her father on returning and seeing the trifling coolness of Giles would be sure to say that the same perversity which had led her to make difficulties about marrying Fitzpiers was now prompting her to blow hot and cold with poor Winterborne. He chanced to be superintending some temporary work in a field opposite her windows.
And the question is, where would you advise me to send her?" The timber-merchant had happened to call at a moment when Fitzpiers was at the spring-tide of a sentiment that Grace was a necessity of his existence.
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