I feel myself going rapidly downhill, and late affairs have still further helped me that way.

And until this thing is done I cannot rest in peace." He added a postscript: "I have just heard that the solicitor is to be seen to-morrow.
Possibly, therefore, I shall return in the evening after you get this." The paternal longing ran on all fours with her own desire; and yet in forwarding it yesterday she had been on the brink of giving offence.
While craving to be a country girl again just as her father requested; to put off the old Eve, the fastidious miss--or rather madam--completely, her first attempt had been beaten by the unexpected vitality of that fastidiousness.

Her father on returning and seeing the trifling coolness of Giles would be sure to say that the same perversity which had led her to make difficulties about marrying Fitzpiers was now prompting her to blow hot and cold with poor Winterborne.
If the latter had been the most subtle hand at touching the stops of her delicate soul instead of one who had just bound himself to let her drift away from him again (if she would) on the wind of her estranging education, he could not have acted more seductively than he did that day.

He chanced to be superintending some temporary work in a field opposite her windows.

She could not discover what he was doing, but she read his mood keenly and truly: she could see in his coming and going an air of determined abandonment of the whole landscape that lay in her direction.
Oh, how she longed to make it up with him! Her father coming in the evening--which meant, she supposed, that all formalities would be in train, her marriage virtually annulled, and she be free to be won again--how could she look him in the face if he should see them estranged thus?
It was a fair green evening in June.