and then the comparatively few
remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by
the measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner from the
back of the room:

"And I' will hold' a wa'-ger with you'
That all' these marks' are thirt'-y two!"

accompanied by rapping strokes with the chalk on the table; then an
exclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards; then the commencement
of the rhymes anew.

The timber-merchant showed his feelings by talking with a satisfied
sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party in a
patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he and his
were not enjoying themselves.

"Oh yes, yes; pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I didn't
know you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy" (to his wife), "you
ought to get some like them for ourselves." And when they had abandoned
cards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury by the fire, it was the
timber-merchant who stood with his back to the mantle in a proprietary
attitude, from which post of vantage he critically regarded Giles's
person, rather as a superficies than as a solid with ideas and feelings
inside it, saying, "What a splendid coat that one is you have on,
Giles! I can't get such coats. You dress better than I."

After supper there was a dance, the bandsmen from Great Hintock having
arrived some time before. Grace had been away from home so long that
she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not join in the
movement. Then Giles felt that all was over. As for her, she was
thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measure
that she had been accustomed to tread with a bevy of sylph-like
creatures in muslin, in the music-room of a large house, most of whom
were now moving in scenes widely removed from this, both as regarded
place and character.

A woman she did not know came and offered to tell her fortune with the
abandoned cards. Grace assented to the proposal, and the woman told
her tale unskilfully, for want of practice, as she declared.

Mr. Melbury was standing by, and exclaimed, contemptuously, "Tell her
fortune, indeed! Her fortune has been told by men of science--what do
you call 'em? Phrenologists. You can't teach her anything new. She's
been too far among the wise ones to be astonished at anything she can
hear among us folks in Hintock."

At last the time came for breaking up, Melbury and his family being the
earli