But her hope that he was again immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her marriage had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply on the slender fact that he often sat up late.
One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down Hill, the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and which opened on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into Blackmoor Vale, or the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath the eye at this point to a distance of many miles.

His attention was fixed on the landscape far away, and Grace's approach was so noiseless that he did not hear her.
When she came close she could see his lips moving unconsciously, as to some impassioned visionary theme.
She spoke, and Fitzpiers started.

"What are you looking at ?" she asked.
"Oh! I was contemplating our old place of Buckbury, in my idle way," he said.
It had seemed to her that he was looking much to the right of that cradle and tomb of his ancestral dignity; but she made no further observation, and taking his arm walked home beside him almost in silence.

She did not know that Middleton Abbey lay in the direction of his gaze.

"Are you going to have out Darling this afternoon ?" she asked, presently.