As regarded the men, there was not much variety: they gave the gate a

kick and passed through. The women were more contrasting. To them the

sticky wood-work was a barricade, a disgust, a menace, a treachery, as

the case might be.

The first that he noticed was a bouncing woman with her skirts tucked

up and her hair uncombed. She grasped the gate without looking, giving

it a supplementary push with her shoulder, when the white imprint drew

from her an exclamation in language not too refined. She went to the

green bank, sat down and rubbed herself in the grass, cursing the while.

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the doctor.

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The next was a girl, with her hair cropped short, in whom the surgeon

recognized the daughter of his late patient, the woodman South.

Moreover, a black bonnet that she wore by way of mourning unpleasantly

reminded him that he had ordered the felling of a tree which had caused

her parent's death and Winterborne's losses. She walked and thought,

and not recklessly; but her preoccupation led her to grasp

unsuspectingly the bar of the gate, and touch it with her arm.

Fitzpiers felt sorry that she should have soiled that new black frock,

poor as it was, for it was probably her only one. She looked at her

hand and arm, seemed but little surprised, wiped off the disfigurement

with an almost unmoved face, and as if without abandoning her original

thoughts. Thus she went on her way.

Then there came over the green quite a different sort of personage.

She walked as delicately as if she had been bred in town, and as firmly

as if she had been bred in the country; she seemed one who dimly knew

her appearance to be attractive, but who retained some of the charm of

being ignorant of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness.

She approached the gate. To let such a creature touch it even with a

tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to

tragical self-destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, but

was unable to find the right one; glancing again out of the window he

saw that he was too late. Having come up, she stopped, looked at the

gate, picked up a little stick, and using it as a bayonet, pushed open

the obstacle without touching it at all.

He steadily watched her till she had passed out of sight, recognizing

her as the very young lady whom he had seen once before and been unable

to identify. Whose could that emotional face be? All the others he had

seen in Hintock as yet oppressed him with their crude rusticity; the

contrast offered by this suggested that she hailed from elsewhere.




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