Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders

28. CHAPTER XXVIII. (continued)

He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-color, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his boots and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards. Her heart rose from its late sadness like a released spring; her senses revelled in the sudden lapse back to nature unadorned. The consciousness of having to be genteel because of her husband's profession, the veneer of artificiality which she had acquired at the fashionable schools, were thrown off, and she became the crude, country girl of her latent, earliest instincts.

Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been starved off by Edgar Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating bare and undiluted manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready to hand. This was an excursion of the imagination which she did not encourage, and she said suddenly, to disguise the confused regard which had followed her thoughts, "Did you meet my husband?"

Winterborne, with some hesitation, "Yes."

"Where did you meet him?"

"At Calfhay Cross. I come from Middleton Abbey; I have been making there for the last week."

"Haven't they a mill of their own?"

"Yes, but it's out of repair."

"I think--I heard that Mrs. Charmond had gone there to stay?"

"Yes. I have seen her at the windows once or twice."

Grace waited an interval before she went on: "Did Mr. Fitzpiers take the way to Middleton?"

"Yes...I met him on Darling." As she did not reply, he added, with a gentler inflection, "You know why the mare was called that?"

"Oh yes--of course," she answered, quickly.