Weeks and months of mourning for Winterborne had been passed by Grace in the soothing¹ monotony of the memorial act to which she and Marty had devoted² themselves. Twice a week the pair went in the dusk to Great Hintock, and, like the two mourners in Cymbeline, sweetened his sad grave with their flowers and their tears. Sometimes Grace thought that it was a pity neither one of them had been his wife for a little while, and given the world a copy of him who was so valuable in their eyes. Nothing ever had brought home to her with such force as this death how little acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling³ personal character. While her simple sorrow for his loss took a softer edge with the lapse⁴ of the autumn and winter seasons, her self-reproach at having had a possible hand in causing it knew little abatement⁵.

Little occurred at Hintock during these months of the fall and decay of the leaf. Discussion of the almost contemporaneous death of Mrs. Charmond abroad had waxed and waned⁶. Fitzpiers had had a marvellous escape from being dragged into the inquiry⁷ which followed it, through the accident of their having parted just before under the influence of Marty South’s letter — the tiny instrument of a cause deep in nature.

Her body was not brought home. It seemed to accord well with the fitful fever of that impassioned woman’s life that she should not have found a native grave. She had enjoyed but a life-interest in the estate, which, after her death, passed to a relative of her husband’s — one who knew not Felice, one whose purpose seemed to be to blot⁸ out every vestige⁹ of her.

On a certain day in February — the cheerful day of St. Valentine, in fact — a letter reached Mrs. Fitzpiers, which had been mentally promised her for that particular day a long time before.

分享到：