s a secret, miss, between us two. The
money would be very useful to me; and I see no harm in it."

"Of course there's no harm. But oh, Grammer, how can you think to do
it? I wish you hadn't told me."

"I wish I hadn't--if you don't like to know it, miss. But you needn't
mind. Lord--hee, hee!--I shall keep him waiting many a year yet, bless
ye!"

"I hope you will, I am sure."

The girl thereupon fell into such deep reflection that conversation
languished, and Grammer Oliver, taking her candle, wished Miss Melbury
good-night. The latter's eyes rested on the distant glimmer, around
which she allowed her reasoning fancy to play in vague eddies that
shaped the doings of the philosopher behind that light on the lines of
intelligence just received. It was strange to her to come back from
the world to Little Hintock and find in one of its nooks, like a
tropical plant in a hedgerow, a nucleus of advanced ideas and practices
which had nothing in common with the life around. Chemical
experiments, anatomical projects, and metaphysical conceptions had
found a strange home here.

Thus she remained thinking, the imagined pursuits of the man behind the
light intermingling with conjectural sketches of his personality, till
her eyes fell together with their own heaviness, and she slept.

CHAPTER VII.

Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer Oliver's
skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne, brought Grace Melbury to
the morning of the next day. It was fine. A north wind was
blowing--that not unacceptable compromise between the atmospheric
cutlery of the eastern blast and the spongy gales of the west quarter.
She looked from her window in the direction of the light of the
previous evening, and could just discern through the trees the shape of
the surgeon's house. Somehow, in the broad, practical daylight, that
unknown and lonely gentleman seemed to be shorn of much of the interest
which had invested his personality and pursuits in the hours of
darkness, and as Grace's dressing proceeded he faded from her mind.

Meanwhile, Winterborne, though half assured of her father's favor, was
rendered a little restless by Miss Melbury's behavior. Despite his dry
self-control, he could not help looking continually from his own door
towards the timber-merchant's, in the probability of somebody's
emergence therefrom. His attention was at length justified by the
appearance of two figures, that of Mr. Melbury