Chapter 44 - Page 2

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, 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.

"He ought to have married YOU, Marty, and nobody else in the