"I never do meet him, father, either without your knowledge or with it."
"So much the better. I don't like the look of this at all. And I say
it not out of harshness to him, poor fellow, but out of tenderness to
you. For how could a woman, brought up delicately as you have been,
bear the roughness of a life with him?"
She sighed; it was a sigh of sympathy with Giles, complicated by a
sense of the intractability of circumstances.
At that same hour, and almost at that same minute, there was a
conversation about Winterborne in progress in the village street,
opposite Mr. Melbury's gates, where Timothy Tangs the elder and Robert
Creedle had accidentally met.
The sawyer was asking Creedle if he had heard what was all over the
parish, the skin of his face being drawn two ways on the
matter--towards brightness in respect of it as news, and towards
concern in respect of it as circumstance.
"Why, that poor little lonesome thing, Marty South, is likely to lose
her father. He was almost well, but is much worse again. A man all
skin and grief he ever were, and if he leave Little Hintock for a
better land, won't it make some difference to your Maister Winterborne,
neighbor Creedle?"
"Can I be a prophet in Israel?" said Creedle. "Won't it! I was only
shaping of such a thing yesterday in my poor, long-seeing way, and all
the work of the house upon my one shoulders! You know what it means? It
is upon John South's life that all Mr. Winterborne's houses hang. If
so be South die, and so make his decease, thereupon the law is that the
houses fall without the least chance of absolution into HER hands at
the House. I told him so; but the words of the faithful be only as
wind!"