me fixed object in the room, a way he
always looked when he narrated anything that amused him. While he
was still thinking of the scene he had described, Grace rose and
said, "I have to go and help my mother now, Mr. Winterborne."

"H'm!" he ejaculated, turning his eyes suddenly upon her.

She repeated her words with a slight blush of awkwardness; whereupon
Giles, becoming suddenly conscious, too conscious, jumped up, saying,
"To be sure, to be sure!" wished them quickly good-morning, and bolted
out of the house.

Nevertheless he had, upon the whole, strengthened his position, with
her at least. Time, too, was on his side, for (as her father saw with
some regret) already the homeliness of Hintock life was fast becoming
effaced from her observation as a singularity; just as the first
strangeness of a face from which we have for years been separated
insensibly passes off with renewed intercourse, and tones itself down
into simple identity with the lineaments of the past.

Thus Mr. Melbury went out of the house still unreconciled to the
sacrifice of the gem he had been at such pains in mounting. He fain
could hope, in the secret nether chamber of his mind, that something
would happen, before the balance of her feeling had quite turned in
Winterborne's favor, to relieve his conscience and preserve her on her
elevated plane.

He could not forget that Mrs. Charmond had apparently abandoned all
interest in his daughter as suddenly as she had conceived it, and was
as firmly convinced as ever that the comradeship which Grace had shown
with Giles and his crew by attending his party had been the cause.

Matters lingered on thus. And then, as a hoop by gentle knocks on this
side and on that is made to travel in specific directions, the little
touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl shaped the
curves of her career.

CHAPTER XII.

It was a day of rather bright weather for the season. Miss Melbury
went out for a morning walk, and her ever-regardful father, having an
hour's leisure, offered to walk with her. The breeze was fresh and
quite steady, filtering itself through the denuded mass of twigs
without swaying them, but making the point of each ivy-leaf on the
trunks scratch its underlying neighbor restlessly. Grace's lips sucked
in this native air of hers like milk. They soon reached a place where
the wood ran down into a corner, and went outside it towards
comparatively open ground. Having looke