She went to the green bank, sat down and rubbed herself in the grass, cursing the while.
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the doctor.
The next was a girl, with her hair cropped short, in whom the surgeon recognized the daughter of his late patient, the woodman South.
Moreover, a black bonnet that she wore by way of mourning unpleasantly reminded him that he had ordered the felling of a tree which had caused her parent's death and Winterborne's losses.

She walked and thought, and not recklessly; but her preoccupation led her to grasp unsuspectingly the bar of the gate, and touch it with her arm.
Fitzpiers felt sorry that she should have soiled that new black frock, poor as it was, for it was probably her only one.

She looked at her hand and arm, seemed but little surprised, wiped off the disfigurement with an almost unmoved face, and as if without abandoning her original thoughts.

Thus she went on her way.
Then there came over the green quite a different sort of personage.
She walked as delicately as if she had been bred in town, and as firmly as if she had been bred in the country; she seemed one who dimly knew her appearance to be attractive, but who retained some of the charm of being ignorant of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness.
She approached the gate.

To let such a creature touch it even with a tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to tragical self-destruction.