Grace was never mentioned between them,
but a rumor of his proposed domestic changes somehow reached her
ears.
"Doctor, you are going away," she exclaimed, confronting him with
accusatory reproach in her large dark eyes no less than in her
rich cooing voice. "Oh yes, you are," she went on, springing to
her feet with an air which might almost have been called
passionate. "It is no use denying it. You have bought a practice
at Budmouth. I don't blame you. Nobody can live at Hintock--
least of all a professional man who wants to keep abreast of
recent discovery. And there is nobody here to induce such a one
to stay for other reasons. That's right, that'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.
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