rs; shining also through the loose
hair about her temples as sunlight through a brake. Her father was
surveying her in a dazed conjecture, so much had she developed and
progressed in manner and stature since he last had set eyes on her.

Observing these things, Winterborne remained dubious by the door,
mechanically tracing with his fingers certain time-worn letters carved
in the jambs--initials of by-gone generations of householders who had
lived and died there.

No, he declared to himself, he would not enter and join the family;
they had forgotten him, and it was enough for to-day that he had
brought her home. Still, he was a little surprised that her father's
eagerness to send him for Grace should have resulted in such an
anticlimax as this.

He walked softly away into the lane towards his own house, looking back
when he reached the turning, from which he could get a last glimpse of
the timber-merchant's roof. He hazarded guesses as to what Grace was
saying just at that moment, and murmured, with some self-derision,
"nothing about me!" He looked also in the other direction, and saw
against the sky the thatched hip and solitary chimney of Marty's
cottage, and thought of her too, struggling bravely along under that
humble shelter, among her spar-gads and pots and skimmers.

At the timber-merchant's, in the mean time, the conversation flowed;
and, as Giles Winterborne had rightly enough deemed, on subjects in
which he had no share. Among the excluding matters there was, for one,
the effect upon Mr. Melbury of the womanly mien and manners of his
daughter, which took him so much unawares that, though it did not make
him absolutely forget the existence of her conductor homeward, thrust
Giles's image back into quite the obscurest cellarage of his brain.
Another was his interview with Mrs. Charmond's agent that morning, at
which the lady herself had been present for a few minutes. Melbury had
purchased some standing timber from her a long time before, and now
that the date had come for felling it he was left to pursue almost his
own course. This was what the household were actually talking of
during Giles's cogitation without; and Melbury's satisfaction with the
clear atmosphere that had arisen between himself and the deity of the
groves which enclosed his residence was the cause of a counterbalancing
mistiness on the side towards Winterborne.

"So thoroughly does she trust me," said Melbury, "that I might fell,
t