The accident, such as it had been, was soon remedied, and the carriage
could be heard descending the hill on the Hintock side, soon to turn
into the lane leading out of the highway, and then into the "drong"
which led out of the lane to the house where she was.
A spasm passed through Grace. The Daphnean instinct, exceptionally
strong in her as a girl, had been revived by her widowed seclusion; and
it was not lessened by her affronted sentiments towards the comer, and
her regard for another man. She opened some little ivory tablets that
lay on the dressing-table, scribbled in pencil on one of them, "I am
gone to visit one of my school-friends," gathered a few toilet
necessaries into a hand-bag, and not three minutes after that voice
had been heard, her slim form, hastily wrapped up from observation,
might have been seen passing out of the back door of Melbury's house.
Thence she skimmed up the garden-path, through the gap in the hedge,
and into the mossy cart-track under the trees which led into the depth
of the woods.
The leaves overhead were now in their latter green--so opaque, that it
was darker at some of the densest spots than in winter-time, scarce a
crevice existing by which a ray could get down to the ground. But in
open places she could see well enough. Summer was ending: in the
daytime singing insects hung in every sunbeam; vegetation was heavy
nightly with globes of dew; and after showers creeping damps and
twilight chills came up from the hollows. The plantations were always
weird at this hour of eve--more spectral far than in the leafless
season, when there were fewer masses and more minute lineality. The
smooth surfaces of glossy plants came out like weak, lidless eyes;
there were strange faces and figures from expiring lights that had
somehow wandered into the canopied obscurity; while now and then low
peeps of the sky between the trunks were like sheeted shapes, and on
the tips of boughs sat faint cloven tongues.
But Grace's fear just now was not imaginative or spiritual, and she
heeded these impressions but little. She went on as silently as she
could, avoiding the hollows wherein leaves had accumulated, and
stepping upon soundless moss and grass-tufts. She paused breathlessly
once or twice, and fancied that she could hear, above the beat of her
strumming pulse, the vehicle containing Fitzpiers turning in at the
gate of her father's premises. She hastened on again.
The Hintock woods owned by Mrs. Charmond were presently left behind,
and those into which she next plunged were divided from the latter by a
bank, from whose top the hedge had long ago perished--starved for want
of sun. It was with some caution that Grace now walked, though she was
quite free from any of the commonplace timidities of her ordinary
pilgrimages to such spots. She feared no lurking harms, but that her
effort would be all in vain, and her return to the house rendered
imperative.