Chapter 27 - Page 2

spoil the picture." Her voice sank almost to a whisper as she
added, with an incipient pout upon her full lips, "Let me think at
least that if you had really loved me at all seriously, you would
have loved me for ever and ever!"

"You are right--think it with all your heart," said he. "It is a
pleasant thought, and costs nothing."

She weighed that remark in silence a while. "Did you ever hear
anything of me from then till now?" she inquired.

"Not a word."

"So much the better. I had to fight the battle of life as well as
you. I may tell you about it some day. But don't ever ask me to
do it, and particularly do not press me to tell you now."

Thus the two or three days that they had spent in tender
acquaintance on the romantic slopes above the Neckar were
stretched out in retrospect to the length and importance of years;
made to form a canvas for infinite fancies, idle dreams, luxurious
melancholies, and sweet, alluring assertions which could neither
be proved nor disproved. Grace was never mentioned between them,
but a rumor of his proposed domestic changes somehow reached her
ears.

"Doctor, you are going away," she exclaimed, confronting him with
accusatory reproach in her large dark eyes no less than in her
rich cooing voice. "Oh yes, you are," she went on, springing to
her feet with an air which might almost have been called
passionate. "It is no use denying it. You have bought a practice
at Budmouth. I don't blame you. Nobody can live at Hintock--
least of all a professional man who wants to keep abreast of
recent discovery. And there is nobody here to induce such a one
to stay for other reasons. That's right, that's right--go away!"

"But no, I have not actually bought the practice as yet, though I
am indeed in treaty for it. And, my dear friend, if I continue to
feel about the business as I feel at this moment--perhaps I may
conclude never to go at all."

"But you hate Hintock, and everybody and everything in it that you
don't mean to take away with you?"

Fitzpiers contradicted this idea in his most vibratory tones, and
she lapsed into the frivolous archness under which she hid
passions of no mean strength--strange, smouldering, erratic
passions, kept down like a stifled conflagration, but bursting out
now here, now there--the only certain element in their direction
being its unexpectedness. If one word could have expressed her it
would have been Inconsequence. She was a woman of perversities,
delighting in frequent contrasts. She liked mystery, in her life,
in her love, in her history. To be fair to her, there was nothing
in the latter which she had any great reason to be ashamed of, and
many things of which she might have been