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The girl thereupon fell into such deep reflection that conversation languished, and Grammer Oliver, taking her candle, wished Miss Melbury good-night. The latter's eyes rested on the distant glimmer, around which she allowed her reasoning fancy to play in vague eddies that shaped the doings of the philosopher behind that light on the lines of intelligence just received.
Having returned from her walk she sat at breakfast silently. When her step-mother had left the room she said to her father, "I have made up my mind that I should like my engagement to Giles to continue, for the present at any rate, till I can see further what I ought to do." Melbury looked much surprised. "Nonsense," he said, sharply. "You don't know what you are talking about. Look here."
There was, in truth, a love-bird yearning to fly from her heart; and it wanted a lodging badly. But no husband came. The fact was that Melbury had been much mistaken about the condition of Fitzpiers. People do not fall headlong on stumps of underwood with impunity.
At the shop-fronts of cutlers he also dawdled, but finally returned to the first establishment which had attracted him, entered, and, for the sum of two pounds, purchased a small, five-chambered revolver with a box of cartridges. He then went back to his lodging, and set to work to find the position of Melbury Gardens upon his map.
The nervous, impatient Melbury was much pleased with the idea of "starting them at once," as he called it. To put his long-delayed reparative scheme in train had become a passion with him now.
"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."
The prompt obedience to her wishes which the surgeon showed did honor to him, if anything could. Before Mrs. Melbury had returned to the room Grace, who was sitting on the parlor window-bench, saw her husband go from the door under the increasing light of morning, with a bag in his hand. While passing through the gate he turned his head.
As they came up to the house, Grace's figure was distinctly visible, drawing the two white curtains together which were used here instead of blinds. "Why, there she is!" said Fitzpiers. "How does she come there?" "In the most natural way in the world. It is her home. Mr. Melbury is her father." "Oh, indeed indeed indeed! How comes he to have a daughter of that stamp?" Winterborne laughed coldly.
Melbury replied that Grace would be sure to marry well, and that hence a hundred pounds more or less from him would not make much difference. Her husband said that that was what she, Mrs. Melbury, naturally thought; but there she was wrong, and in that lay the source of his trouble. "I have a plan in my head about her," he said; "and according to my plan she won't marry a rich man."
Two simultaneous troubles do not always make a double trouble; and thus it came to pass that Giles's practical anxiety about his houses, which would have been enough to keep him awake half the night at any other time, was displaced and not reinforced by his sentimental trouble about Grace Melbury.
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