Chapter 28

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A week had passed, and Mrs. Charmond had left Hintock House.
Middleton Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles
distant by road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways.

Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless,
that at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous
civility of mere acquaintanceship crept into his manner; yet, when
sitting at meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks. Her
little doings interested him no longer, while towards her father
his bearing was not far from supercilious. It was plain that his
mind was entirely outside her life, whereabouts outside it she
could not tell; in some region of science, possibly, or of
psychological literature. But her hope that he was again
immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her marriage
had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply on
the slender fact that he often sat up late.

One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down
Hill, the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and
which opened on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into
Blackmoor Vale, or the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath
the eye at this point to a distance of many miles. His attention
was fixed on the landscape far away, and Grace's approach was so
noiseless that he did not hear her. When she came close she could
see his lips moving unconsciously, as to some impassioned
visionary theme.

She spoke, and Fitzpiers started. "What are you looking at?" she
asked.

"Oh! I was contemplating our old place of Buckbury, in my idle
way," he said.

It had seemed to her that he was looking much to the right of that
cradle and tomb of his ancestral dignity; but she made no further
observation, and taking his arm walked home beside him almost in
silence. She did not know that Middleton Abbey lay in the
direction of his gaze. "Are you going to have out Darling this
afternoon?" she asked, presently. Darling being the light-gray
mare which Winterborne had bought for Grace, and which Fitzpiers
now constantly used, the animal having turned out a wonderful
bargain, in combining a perfect docility with an almost human
intelligence; moreover, she was not too young. Fitzpiers was
unfamiliar with horses, and he valued these qualities.

"Yes," he replied, "but not to drive. I am riding her. I
practise crossing a horse as often as I can now, for I find that I
can take much shorter cuts on horseback."

He had, in fact, taken these riding exercises for about a week,
only since Mrs. Charmond's absence, his universal practice
hitherto having been to drive.

Some few days later, Fitzpiers started on the back