Grace was muffled up in her winter dress, and he thought that she had never looked so seductive as at this moment, in the noontide bright but heatless sun, and the keen wind, and the purplish-gray masses of brushwood around.
Fitzpiers continued to regard the nearing picture, till at length their glances met for a moment, when she demurely sent off hers at a tangent and gave him the benefit of her three-quarter face, while with courteous completeness of conduct he lifted his hat in a large arc.
Marty dropped behind; and when Fitzpiers held out his hand, Grace touched it with her fingers.
"I have agreed to be here mostly because I wanted to ask you something important," said Mrs.Fitzpiers, her intonation modulating in a direction that she had not quite wished it to take.
"I am most attentive," said her husband.

"Shall we take to the wood for privacy ?" Grace demurred, and Fitzpiers gave in, and they kept the public road.
At any rate she would take his arm?
This also was gravely negatived, the refusal being audible to Marty.
"Why not ?" he inquired.
"Oh, Mr.Fitzpiers--how can you ask ?" "Right, right," said he, his effusiveness shrivelled up.
As they walked on she returned to her inquiry.

"It is about a matter that may perhaps be unpleasant to you.

But I think I need not consider that too carefully." "Not at all," said Fitzpiers, heroically.
She then took him back to the time of poor Winterborne's death, and related the precise circumstances amid which his fatal illness had come upon him, particularizing the dampness of the shelter to which he had betaken himself, his concealment from her of the hardships that he was undergoing, all that he had put up with, all that he had done for her in his scrupulous considerateness.

The retrospect brought her to tears as she asked him if he thought that the sin of having driven him to his death was upon her.
Fitzpiers could hardly help showing his satisfaction at what her narrative indirectly revealed, the actual harmlessness of an escapade with her lover, which had at first, by her own showing, looked so grave, and he did not care to inquire whether that harmlessness had been the result of aim or of accident.