Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders

39. CHAPTER XXXIX. (continued)

"You mean that it must BE settled, since my father is coming home?" she said, gladly.

Winterborne, though fighting valiantly against himself all this while--though he would have protected Grace's good repute as the apple of his eye--was a man; and, as Desdemona said, men are not gods. In face of the agonizing seductiveness shown by her, in her unenlightened school-girl simplicity about the laws and ordinances, he betrayed a man's weakness. Since it was so--since it had come to this, that Grace, deeming herself free to do it, was virtually asking him to demonstrate that he loved her--since he could demonstrate it only too truly--since life was short and love was strong--he gave way to the temptation, notwithstanding that he perfectly well knew her to be wedded irrevocably to Fitzpiers. Indeed, he cared for nothing past or future, simply accepting the present and what it brought, desiring once in his life to clasp in his arms her he had watched over and loved so long.

She started back suddenly from his embrace, influenced by a sort of inspiration. "Oh, I suppose," she stammered, "that I am really free?--that this is right? Is there REALLY a new law? Father cannot have been too sanguine in saying--"

He did not answer, and a moment afterwards Grace burst into tears in spite of herself. "Oh, why does not my father come home and explain," she sobbed, "and let me know clearly what I am? It is too trying, this, to ask me to--and then to leave me so long in so vague a state that I do not know what to do, and perhaps do wrong!"

Winterborne felt like a very Cain, over and above his previous sorrow. How he had sinned against her in not telling her what he knew. He turned aside; the feeling of his cruelty mounted higher and higher. How could he have dreamed of kissing her? He could hardly refrain from tears. Surely nothing more pitiable had ever been known than the condition of this poor young thing, now as heretofore the victim of her father's well-meant but blundering policy.