Status Updates From The Woodlanders

He would have given much to win Grace's forgiveness then. But whatever he dared hope for in that kind from the future, there was nothing to be done yet, while Giles Winterborne's memory was green. To wait was imperative. "A little time might melt her frozen thoughts" and lead her to look on him with toleration, if not with love.

“To every bad there is a worse”

🤭 this guy seems to relish in the absurdity of endless misfortune 😂

He unhooked a dark lantern from a nail under the eaves, and she did not notice how his hand shook with the slight strain, or dream that, in making this offer, he was taxing a convalescence that could ill-afford such self-sacrifice. The lantern was lit, and they started.

(...) People do not fall headlong on stumps of underwood with impunity. Had the old man been able to watch Fitzpiers narrowly enough, he would have observed that, on rising and walking into the thicket, he dropped blood as he went; that he had not proceeded fifty yards before he showed signs of being dizzy, and, raising his hands to his head, reeled and fell.

Another pause ensued, and they looked gloomily at the smoke that beat about the roof of hurdles through whose weavings a large drop of rain fell at intervals and spat smartly into the fire. Mrs Charmond had been no friend to Winterbourne, but he was mainly, and it was not in his heart to let her be condemned without a trial. (...)

She resolved to be sad no more. She drank two glasses of champagne, and a little more still after those; and amused herself in the evening with singing pretty amatory songs.

(...) His daughter's suitor was descended from a line he had heard of in his grandfather's time as being once among the greatest, a family which had conferred its name upon a neighbouring village; how then could anything be amiss in this betrothal.