Fitzpiers was generous in his turn. "It shall be so," he rejoined,

gracefully. "To holy church we'll go, and much good may it do us."

They returned through the bushes indoors, Grace walking, full of

thought between the other two, somewhat comforted, both by Fitzpiers's

ingenious explanation and by the sense that she was not to be deprived

of a religious ceremony. "So let it be," she said to herself. "Pray

God it is for the best."

From this hour there was no serious attempt at recalcitration on her

part. Fitzpiers kept himself continually near her, dominating any

rebellious impulse, and shaping her will into passive concurrence with

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all his desires. Apart from his lover-like anxiety to possess her, the

few golden hundreds of the timber-dealer, ready to hand, formed a warm

background to Grace's lovely face, and went some way to remove his

uneasiness at the prospect of endangering his professional and social

chances by an alliance with the family of a simple countryman.

The interim closed up its perspective surely and silently. Whenever

Grace had any doubts of her position, the sense of contracting time was

like a shortening chamber: at other moments she was comparatively

blithe. Day after day waxed and waned; the one or two woodmen who

sawed, shaped, spokeshaved on her father's premises at this inactive

season of the year, regularly came and unlocked the doors in the

morning, locked them in the evening, supped, leaned over their

garden-gates for a whiff of evening air, and to catch any last and

farthest throb of news from the outer world, which entered and expired

at Little Hintock like the exhausted swell of a wave in some innermost

cavern of some innermost creek of an embayed sea; yet no news

interfered with the nuptial purpose at their neighbor's house. The

sappy green twig-tips of the season's growth would not, she thought,

be appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the

time; the tints of the foliage would hardly have changed. Everything

was so much as usual that no itinerant stranger would have supposed a

woman's fate to be hanging in the balance at that summer's decline.

But there were preparations, imaginable readily enough by those who had

special knowledge. In the remote and fashionable town of Sandbourne

something was growing up under the hands of several persons who had

never seen Grace Melbury, never would see her, or care anything about

her at all, though their creation had such interesting relation to her

life that it would enclose her very heart at a moment when that heart

would beat, if not with more emotional ardor, at least with more

emotional turbulence than at any previous time.




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