Chapter 38 - Page 2

striven
to join together in earlier days, and that in his ardor to do this
he was oblivious of formalities. The cautious supervision of his
past years had overleaped itself at last. hence, Winterborne
perceived that, in this new beginning, the necessary care not to
compromise Grace by too early advances must be exercised by
himself.

Perhaps Winterborne was not quite so ardent as heretofore. There
is no such thing as a stationary love: men are either loving more
or loving less. But Giles himself recognized no decline in his
sense of her dearness. If the flame did indeed burn lower now
than when he had fetched her from Sherton at her last return from
school, the marvel was small. He had been laboring ever since his
rejection and her marriage to reduce his former passion to a
docile friendship, out of pure regard to its expediency; and their
separation may have helped him to a partial success.

A week and more passed, and there was no further news of Melbury.
But the effect of the intelligence he had already transmitted upon
the elastic-nerved daughter of the woods had been much what the
old surgeon Jones had surmised. It had soothed her perturbed
spirit better than all the opiates in the pharmacopoeia. She had
slept unbrokenly a whole night and a day. The "new law" was to
her a mysterious, beneficent, godlike entity, lately descended
upon earth, that would make her as she once had been without
trouble or annoyance. Her position fretted her, its abstract
features rousing an aversion which was even greater than her
aversion to the personality of him who had caused it. It was
mortifying, productive of slights, undignified. Him she could
forget; her circumstances she had always with her.

She saw nothing of Winterborne during the days of her recovery;
and perhaps on that account her fancy wove about him a more
romantic tissue than it could have done if he had stood before her
with all the specks and flaws inseparable from corporeity. He
rose upon her memory as the fruit-god and the wood-god in
alternation; sometimes leafy, and smeared with green lichen, as
she had seen him among the sappy boughs of the plantations;
sometimes cider-stained, and with apple-pips in the hair of his
arms, as she had met him on his return from cider-making in White
Hart Vale, with his vats and presses beside him. In her secret
heart she almost approximated to her father's enthusiasm in
wishing to show Giles once for all how she still regarded him.
The question whether the future would indeed bring them together
for life was a standing wonder with her. She knew that it could
not with any propriety do so just yet. But reverently believing
in her father's sound judgment and knowledge, as good girls are