Weeks and months of mourning for Winterborne had been passed by Grace
in the soothing monotony of the memorial act to which she and Marty had
devoted themselves. Twice a week the pair went in the dusk to Great
Hintock, and, like the two mourners in Cymbeline, sweetened his sad
grave with their flowers and their tears. Sometimes Grace thought that
it was a pity neither one of them had been his wife for a little while,
and given the world a copy of him who was so valuable in their eyes.
Nothing ever had brought home to her with such force as this death how
little acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling personal
character. While her simple sorrow for his loss took a softer edge with
the lapse of the autumn and winter seasons, her self-reproach at having
had a possible hand in causing it knew little abatement.

Little occurred at Hintock during these months of the fall and decay of
the leaf. Discussion of the almost contemporaneous death of Mrs.
Charmond abroad had waxed and waned. Fitzpiers had had a marvellous
escape from being dragged into the inquiry which followed it, through
the accident of their having parted just before under the influence of
Marty South's letter--the tiny instrument of a cause deep in nature.

Her body was not brought home. It seemed to accord well with the
fitful fever of that impassioned woman's life that she should not have
found a native grave. She had enjoyed but a life-interest in the
estate, which, after her death, passed to a relative of her
husband's--one who knew not Felice, one whose purpose seemed to be to
blot out every vestige of her.