aid, in lower tones, with an effort, "She's yours,
Giles, as far as I am concerned."

"Thanks--my best thanks....But I think, since it is all right between
us about the biddings, that I'll not interrupt her now. I'll step
homeward, and call another time."

On leaving the house he looked up at the bedroom again. Grace,
surrounded by a sufficient number of candles to answer all purposes of
self-criticism, was standing before a cheval-glass that her father had
lately bought expressly for her use; she was bonneted, cloaked, and
gloved, and glanced over her shoulder into the mirror, estimating her
aspect. Her face was lit with the natural elation of a young girl
hoping to inaugurate on the morrow an intimate acquaintance with a new,
interesting, and powerful friend.

CHAPTER VIII.

The inspiriting appointment which had led Grace Melbury to indulge in a
six-candle illumination for the arrangement of her attire, carried her
over the ground the next morning with a springy tread. Her sense of
being properly appreciated on her own native soil seemed to brighten
the atmosphere and herbage around her, as the glowworm's lamp
irradiates the grass. Thus she moved along, a vessel of emotion going
to empty itself on she knew not what.

Twenty minutes' walking through copses, over a stile, and along an
upland lawn brought her to the verge of a deep glen, at the bottom of
which Hintock House appeared immediately beneath her eye. To describe
it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the
manor-house; it stood in a hole, notwithstanding that the hole was full
of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily
have been thrown over or into, the birds'-nested chimneys of the
mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the
gray lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps,
rolls, and skylights, together with incised letterings and
shoe-patterns cut by idlers thereon.

The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of
Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored
freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not
overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every
shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground,
till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.

Above the house to the back was a dense plantation, the roots of whose
trees were above the le