Great Hintock church stood at the upper part of the village, and could

be reached without passing through the street. In the dusk of the late

September day they went thither by secret ways, walking mostly in

silence side by side, each busied with her own thoughts. Grace had a

trouble exceeding Marty's--that haunting sense of having put out the

light of his life by her own hasty doings. She had tried to persuade

herself that he might have died of his illness, even if she had not

taken possession of his house. Sometimes she succeeded in her attempt;

sometimes she did not.

They stood by the grave together, and though the sun had gone down,

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they could see over the woodland for miles, and down to the vale in

which he had been accustomed to descend every year, with his portable

mill and press, to make cider about this time.

Perhaps Grace's first grief, the discovery that if he had lived he

could never have claimed her, had some power in softening this, the

second. On Marty's part there was the same consideration; never would

she have been his. As no anticipation of gratified affection had been

in existence while he was with them, there was none to be disappointed

now that he had gone.

Grace was abased when, by degrees, she found that she had never

understood Giles as Marty had done. Marty South alone, of all the

women in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne's level

of intelligent intercourse with nature. In that respect she had formed

the complement to him in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart,

had subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.

The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that

wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with

these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of

its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read

its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of

night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace

a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple

occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They

had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had,

with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and

symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together

made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces,

when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the

species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the

wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort

afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or

tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the

stratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of the

seasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own point of view, and

not from that of the spectator's.




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