at's
right--go away!"

"But no, I have not actually bought the practice as yet, though I am
indeed in treaty for it. And, my dear friend, if I continue to feel
about the business as I feel at this moment--perhaps I may conclude
never to go at all."

"But you hate Hintock, and everybody and everything in it that you
don't mean to take away with you?"

Fitzpiers contradicted this idea in his most vibratory tones, and she
lapsed into the frivolous archness under which she hid passions of no
mean strength--strange, smouldering, erratic passions, kept down like a
stifled conflagration, but bursting out now here, now there--the only
certain element in their direction being its unexpectedness. If one
word could have expressed her it would have been Inconsequence. She
was a woman of perversities, delighting in frequent contrasts. She
liked mystery, in her life, in her love, in her history. To be fair to
her, there was nothing in the latter which she had any great reason to
be ashamed of, and many things of which she might have been proud; but
it had never been fathomed by the honest minds of Hintock, and she
rarely volunteered her experiences. As for her capricious nature, the
people on her estates grew accustomed to it, and with that marvellous
subtlety of contrivance in steering round odd tempers, that is found in
sons of the soil and dependants generally, they managed to get along
under her government rather better than they would have done beneath a
more equable rule.

Now, with regard to the doctor's notion of leaving Hintock, he had
advanced further towards completing the purchase of the Budmouth
surgeon's good-will than he had admitted to Mrs. Charmond. The whole
matter hung upon what he might do in the ensuing twenty-four hours.
The evening after leaving her he went out into the lane, and walked and
pondered between the high hedges, now greenish-white with wild
clematis--here called "old-man's beard," from its aspect later in the
year.

The letter of acceptance was to be written that night, after which his
departure from Hintock would be irrevocable. But could he go away,
remembering what had just passed? The trees, the hills, the leaves, the
grass--each had been endowed and quickened with a subtle charm since he
had discovered the person and history, and, above all, mood of their
owner. There was every temporal reason for leaving; it would be
entering again into a world which he had only quitted in a pa