ll?"

"Yes," said Winterborne.

She glanced ponderingly up at him. "Not about me?"

"Yes."

His mouth was lined with charactery which told her that he had been
bidden to take the hint as to the future which she had been bidden to
give. The unexpected discovery sent a scarlet pulsation through Grace
for the moment. However, it was only Giles who stood there, of whom
she had no fear; and her self-possession returned.

"He said I was to sound you with a view to--what you will understand,
if you care to," continued Winterborne, in a low voice. Having been
put on this track by herself, he was not disposed to abandon it in a
hurry.

They had been children together, and there was between them that
familiarity as to personal affairs which only such acquaintanceship can
give. "You know, Giles," she answered, speaking in a very practical
tone, "that that is all very well; but I am in a very anomalous
position at present, and I cannot say anything to the point about such
things as those."

"No?" he said, with a stray air as regarded the subject. He was
looking at her with a curious consciousness of discovery. He had not
been imagining that their renewed intercourse would show her to him
thus. For the first time he realized an unexpectedness in her, which,
after all, should not have been unexpected. She before him was not the
girl Grace Melbury whom he used to know. Of course, he might easily
have prefigured as much; but it had never occurred to him. She was a
woman who had been married; she had moved on; and without having lost
her girlish modesty, she had lost her girlish shyness. The inevitable
change, though known to him, had not been heeded; and it struck him
into a momentary fixity. The truth was that he had never come into
close comradeship with her since her engagement to Fitzpiers, with the
brief exception of the evening encounter on Rubdown Hill, when she met
him with his cider apparatus; and that interview had been of too
cursory a kind for insight.

Winterborne had advanced, too. He could criticise her. Times had been
when to criticise a single trait in Grace Melbury would have lain as
far beyond his powers as to criticise a deity. This thing was sure: it
was a new woman in many ways whom he had come out to see; a creature of
more ideas, more dignity, and, above all, more assurance, than the
original Grace had been capable of. He could not at first decide
whether he were pleased or displeased