, Mrs. Fitzpiers has her remedy."

"How--what--a remedy?" said Melbury.

"Under the new law, sir. A new court was established last year, and
under the new statute, twenty and twenty-one Vic., cap. eighty-five,
unmarrying is as easy as marrying. No more Acts of Parliament
necessary; no longer one law for the rich and another for the poor.
But come inside--I was just going to have a nibleykin of rum hot--I'll
explain it all to you."

The intelligence amazed Melbury, who saw little of newspapers. And
though he was a severely correct man in his habits, and had no taste
for entering a tavern with Fred Beaucock--nay, would have been quite
uninfluenced by such a character on any other matter in the world--such
fascination lay in the idea of delivering his poor girl from bondage,
that it deprived him of the critical faculty. He could not resist the
ex-lawyer's clerk, and entered the inn.

Here they sat down to the rum, which Melbury paid for as a matter of
course, Beaucock leaning back in the settle with a legal gravity which
would hardly allow him to be conscious of the spirits before him,
though they nevertheless disappeared with mysterious quickness.

How much of the exaggerated information on the then new divorce laws
which Beaucock imparted to his listener was the result of ignorance,
and how much of dupery, was never ascertained. But he related such a
plausible story of the ease with which Grace could become a free woman
that her father was irradiated with the project; and though he scarcely
wetted his lips, Melbury never knew how he came out of the inn, or when
or where he mounted his gig to pursue his way homeward. But home he
found himself, his brain having all the way seemed to ring sonorously
as a gong in the intensity of its stir. Before he had seen Grace, he
was accidentally met by Winterborne, who found his face shining as if
he had, like the Law-giver, conversed with an angel.

He relinquished his horse, and took Winterborne by the arm to a heap of
rendlewood--as barked oak was here called--which lay under a
privet-hedge.

"Giles," he said, when they had sat down upon the logs, "there's a new
law in the land! Grace can be free quite easily. I only knew it by the
merest accident. I might not have found it out for the next ten years.
She can get rid of him--d'ye hear?--get rid of him. Think of that, my
friend Giles!"

He related what he had learned of the new legal remedy. A subdued
tremulousness