Examine Grace as her father might, she would admit nothing. For the

present, therefore, he simply watched.

The suspicion that his darling child was being slighted wrought almost

a miraculous change in Melbury's nature. No man so furtive for the

time as the ingenuous countryman who finds that his ingenuousness has

been abused. Melbury's heretofore confidential candor towards his

gentlemanly son-in-law was displaced by a feline stealth that did

injury to his every action, thought, and mood. He knew that a woman

once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and

made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first

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time he asked himself why this so generally should be so. Moreover,

this case was not, he argued, like ordinary cases. Leaving out the

question of Grace being anything but an ordinary woman, her peculiar

situation, as it were in mid-air between two planes of society,

together with the loneliness of Hintock, made a husband's neglect a far

more tragical matter to her than it would be to one who had a large

circle of friends to fall back upon. Wisely or unwisely, and whatever

other fathers did, he resolved to fight his daughter's battle still.

Mrs. Charmond had returned. But Hintock House scarcely gave forth

signs of life, so quietly had she reentered it. He went to church at

Great Hintock one afternoon as usual, there being no service at the

smaller village. A few minutes before his departure, he had casually

heard Fitzpiers, who was no church-goer, tell his wife that he was

going to walk in the wood. Melbury entered the building and sat down

in his pew; the parson came in, then Mrs. Charmond, then Mr. Fitzpiers.

The service proceeded, and the jealous father was quite sure that a

mutual consciousness was uninterruptedly maintained between those two;

he fancied that more than once their eyes met. At the end, Fitzpiers

so timed his movement into the aisle that it exactly coincided with

Felice Charmond's from the opposite side, and they walked out with

their garments in contact, the surgeon being just that two or three

inches in her rear which made it convenient for his eyes to rest upon

her cheek. The cheek warmed up to a richer tone.

This was a worse feature in the flirtation than he had expected. If she

had been playing with him in an idle freak the game might soon have

wearied her; but the smallest germ of passion--and women of the world

do not change color for nothing--was a threatening development. The

mere presence of Fitzpiers in the building, after his statement, was

wellnigh conclusive as far as he was concerned; but Melbury resolved

yet to watch.




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