Grace's eyes had tears in them. "I don't like to go to him on such an

errand, Grammer," she said, brokenly. "But I will, to ease your mind."

It was with extreme reluctance that Grace cloaked herself next morning

for the undertaking. She was all the more indisposed to the journey by

reason of Grammer's allusion to the effect of a pretty face upon Dr.

Fitzpiers; and hence she most illogically did that which, had the

doctor never seen her, would have operated to stultify the sole motive

of her journey; that is to say, she put on a woollen veil, which hid

all her face except an occasional spark of her eyes.

Her own wish that nothing should be known of this strange and grewsome

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proceeding, no less than Grammer Oliver's own desire, led Grace to take

every precaution against being discovered. She went out by the garden

door as the safest way, all the household having occupations at the

other side. The morning looked forbidding enough when she stealthily

opened it. The battle between frost and thaw was continuing in

mid-air: the trees dripped on the garden-plots, where no vegetables

would grow for the dripping, though they were planted year after year

with that curious mechanical regularity of country people in the face

of hopelessness; the moss which covered the once broad gravel terrace

was swamped; and Grace stood irresolute. Then she thought of poor

Grammer, and her dreams of the doctor running after her, scalpel in

hand, and the possibility of a case so curiously similar to South's

ending in the same way; thereupon she stepped out into the drizzle.

The nature of her errand, and Grammer Oliver's account of the compact

she had made, lent a fascinating horror to Grace's conception of

Fitzpiers. She knew that he was a young man; but her single object in

seeking an interview with him put all considerations of his age and

social aspect from her mind. Standing as she stood, in Grammer Oliver's

shoes, he was simply a remorseless Jove of the sciences, who would not

have mercy, and would have sacrifice; a man whom, save for this, she

would have preferred to avoid knowing. But since, in such a small

village, it was improbable that any long time could pass without their

meeting, there was not much to deplore in her having to meet him now.

But, as need hardly be said, Miss Melbury's view of the doctor as a

merciless, unwavering, irresistible scientist was not quite in

accordance with fact. The real Dr. Fitzpiers w as a man of too many

hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in the

profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide practice in the

rural district he had marked out as his field of survey for the

present. In the course of a year his mind was accustomed to pass in a

grand solar sweep through all the zodiacal signs of the intellectual

heaven. Sometimes it was in the Ram, sometimes in the Bull; one month

he would be immersed in alchemy, another in poesy; one month in the

Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in the Crab of German literature

and metaphysics. In justice to him it must be stated that he took such

studies as were immediately related to his own profession in turn with

the rest, and it had been in a month of anatomical ardor without the

possibility of a subject that he had proposed to Grammer Oliver the

terms she had mentioned to her mistress.




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