to his
life; that he had never gone near a church latterly, and had been
sometimes seen on Sundays with unblacked boots, lying on his elbow
under a tree, with a cynical gaze at surrounding objects. He was
likely to return to Hintock when the cider-making season came round,
his apparatus being stored there, and travel with his mill and press
from village to village.

The narrow interval that stood before the day diminished yet. There was
in Grace's mind sometimes a certain anticipative satisfaction, the
satisfaction of feeling that she would be the heroine of an hour;
moreover, she was proud, as a cultivated woman, to be the wife of a
cultivated man. It was an opportunity denied very frequently to young
women in her position, nowadays not a few; those in whom parental
discovery of the value of education has implanted tastes which parental
circles fail to gratify. But what an attenuation was this cold pride
of the dream of her youth, in which she had pictured herself walking in
state towards the altar, flushed by the purple light and bloom of her
own passion, without a single misgiving as to the sealing of the bond,
and fervently receiving as her due

"The homage of a thousand hearts; the fond, deep love of one."

Everything had been clear then, in imagination; now something was
undefined. She had little carking anxieties; a curious fatefulness
seemed to rule her, and she experienced a mournful want of some one to
confide in.

The day loomed so big and nigh that her prophetic ear could, in fancy,
catch the noise of it, hear the murmur of the villagers as she came out
of church, imagine the jangle of the three thin-toned Hintock bells.
The dialogues seemed to grow louder, and the ding-ding-dong of those
three crazed bells more persistent. She awoke: the morning had come.

Five hours later she was the wife of Fitzpiers.

CHAPTER XXV.

The chief hotel at Sherton-Abbas was an old stone-fronted inn with a
yawning arch, under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to
back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street
were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the
opposite houses; hence, perhaps, it arose that the best and most
luxurious private sitting-room that the inn could afford over-looked
the nether parts of the establishment, where beyond the yard were to be
seen gardens and orchards, now bossed, nay incrusted, with scarlet and
gold fruit, stretching