Winterborne's house had been pulled down. On this account his face had

been seen but fitfully in Hintock; and he would probably have

disappeared from the place altogether but for his slight business

connection with Melbury, on whose premises Giles kept his cider-making

apparatus, now that he had no place of his own to stow it in. Coming

here one evening on his way to a hut beyond the wood where he now

slept, he noticed that the familiar brown-thatched pinion of his

paternal roof had vanished from its site, and that the walls were

levelled. In present circumstances he had a feeling for the spot that

might have been called morbid, and when he had supped in the hut

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aforesaid he made use of the spare hour before bedtime to return to

Little Hintock in the twilight and ramble over the patch of ground on

which he had first seen the day.

He repeated this evening visit on several like occasions. Even in the

gloom he could trace where the different rooms had stood; could mark

the shape of the kitchen chimney-corner, in which he had roasted apples

and potatoes in his boyhood, cast his bullets, and burned his initials

on articles that did and did not belong to him. The apple-trees still

remained to show where the garden had been, the oldest of them even now

retaining the crippled slant to north-east given them by the great

November gale of 1824, which carried a brig bodily over the Chesil

Bank. They were at present bent to still greater obliquity by the

heaviness of their produce. Apples bobbed against his head, and in the

grass beneath he crunched scores of them as he walked. There was

nobody to gather them now.

It was on the evening under notice that, half sitting, half leaning

against one of these inclined trunks, Winterborne had become lost in

his thoughts, as usual, till one little star after another had taken up

a position in the piece of sky which now confronted him where his walls

and chimneys had formerly raised their outlines. The house had jutted

awkwardly into the road, and the opening caused by its absence was very

distinct.

In the silence the trot of horses and the spin of carriage-wheels

became audible; and the vehicle soon shaped itself against the blank

sky, bearing down upon him with the bend in the lane which here

occurred, and of which the house had been the cause. He could discern

the figure of a woman high up on the driving-seat of a phaeton, a groom

being just visible behind. Presently there was a slight scrape, then a

scream. Winterborne went across to the spot, and found the phaeton

half overturned, its driver sitting on the heap of rubbish which had

once been his dwelling, and the man seizing the horses' heads. The

equipage was Mrs. Charmond's, and the unseated charioteer that lady

herself.




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