A week had passed, and Mrs. Charmond had left Hintock House. Middleton

Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles distant by

road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways.

Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless, that

at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous civility

of mere acquaintanceship crept into his manner; yet, when sitting at

meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks. Her little doings

interested him no longer, while towards her father his bearing was not

far from supercilious. It was plain that his mind was entirely outside

her life, whereabouts outside it she could not tell; in some region of

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science, possibly, or of psychological literature. But her hope that

he was again immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her

marriage had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply

on the slender fact that he often sat up late.

One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down Hill,

the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and which opened

on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into Blackmoor Vale, or

the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath the eye at this point to

a distance of many miles. His attention was fixed on the landscape far

away, and Grace's approach was so noiseless that he did not hear her.

When she came close she could see his lips moving unconsciously, as to

some impassioned visionary theme.

She spoke, and Fitzpiers started. "What are you looking at?" she asked.

"Oh! I was contemplating our old place of Buckbury, in my idle way," he

said.

It had seemed to her that he was looking much to the right of that

cradle and tomb of his ancestral dignity; but she made no further

observation, and taking his arm walked home beside him almost in

silence. She did not know that Middleton Abbey lay in the direction of

his gaze. "Are you going to have out Darling this afternoon?" she

asked, presently. Darling being the light-gray mare which Winterborne

had bought for Grace, and which Fitzpiers now constantly used, the

animal having turned out a wonderful bargain, in combining a perfect

docility with an almost human intelligence; moreover, she was not too

young. Fitzpiers was unfamiliar with horses, and he valued these

qualities.

"Yes," he replied, "but not to drive. I am riding her. I practise

crossing a horse as often as I can now, for I find that I can take much

shorter cuts on horseback."

He had, in fact, taken these riding exercises for about a week, only

since Mrs. Charmond's absence, his universal practice hitherto having

been to drive.




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