The sunny, leafy week which followed the tender doings of Midsummer Eve
brought a visitor to Fitzpiers's door; a voice that he knew sounded in
the passage. Mr. Melbury had called. At first he had a particular
objection to enter the parlor, because his boots were dusty, but as the
surgeon insisted he waived the point and came in.

Looking neither to the right nor to the left, hardly at Fitzpiers
himself, he put his hat under his chair, and with a preoccupied gaze at
the floor, he said, "I've called to ask you, doctor, quite privately, a
question that troubles me. I've a daughter, Grace, an only daughter,
as you may have heard. Well, she's been out in the dew--on Midsummer
Eve in particular she went out in thin slippers to watch some vagary of
the Hintock maids--and she's got a cough, a distinct hemming and
hacking, that makes me uneasy. Now, I have decided to send her away to
some seaside place for a change--"

"Send her away!" Fitzpiers's countenance had fallen.

"Yes. And the question is, where would you advise me to send her?"

The timber-merchant had happened to call at a moment when Fitzpiers was
at the spring-tide of a sentiment that Grace was a necessity of his
existence. The sudden pressure of her form upon his breast as she came
headlong round the bush had never ceased to linger with him, ever since
he adopted the manoeuvre for which the hour and the moonlight and the
occasion had been the only excuse. Now she was to be sent away.
Ambition? it could be postponed. Family? culture and reciprocity of
tastes had taken the place of family nowadays. He allowed himself to
be carried forward on the wave of his desire.