But it appeared to have no bearing upon herself whatever. Giles read
its contents; and almost immediately turned away to a gap in the hedge
of the orchard--if that could be called a hedge which, owing to the
drippings of the trees, was little more than a bank with a bush upon it
here and there. He entered the plantation, and was no doubt going that
way homeward to the mysterious hut he occupied on the other side of the
woodland.
The sad sands were running swiftly through Time's glass; she had often
felt it in these latter days; and, like Giles, she felt it doubly now
after the solemn and pathetic reminder in her father's communication.
Her freshness would pass, the long-suffering devotion of Giles might
suddenly end--might end that very hour. Men were so strange. The
thought took away from her all her former reticence, and made her
action bold. She started from her seat. If the little breach,
quarrel, or whatever it might be called, of yesterday, was to be healed
up it must be done by her on the instant. She crossed into the
orchard, and clambered through the gap after Giles, just as he was
diminishing to a faun-like figure under the green canopy and over the
brown floor.
Grace had been wrong--very far wrong--in assuming that the letter had
no reference to herself because Giles had turned away into the wood
after its perusal. It was, sad to say, because the missive had so much
reference to herself that he had thus turned away. He feared that his
grieved discomfiture might be observed. The letter was from Beaucock,
written a few hours later than Melbury's to his daughter. It announced
failure.
Giles had once done that thriftless man a good turn, and now was the
moment when Beaucock had chosen to remember it in his own way. During
his absence in town with Melbury, the lawyer's clerk had naturally
heard a great deal of the timber-merchant's family scheme of justice to
Giles, and his communication was to inform Winterborne at the earliest
possible moment that their attempt had failed, in order that the young
man should not place himself in a false position towards Grace in the
belief of its coming success. The news was, in sum, that Fitzpiers's
conduct had not been sufficiently cruel to Grace to enable her to snap
the bond. She was apparently doomed to be his wife till the end of the chapter.
Winterborne quite forgot his superficial differences with the poor girl
under the warm rush of deep and distracting love for her which the
almost tragical information engendered.