It happened that Grace went out for an early ramble that morning,
passing through the door and gate while her father was in the
spar-house. To go in her customary direction she could not avoid
passing Winterborne's house. The morning sun was shining flat
upon its white surface, and the words, which still remained, were
immediately visible to her. She read them. Her face flushed to
crimson. She could see Giles and Creedle talking together at the
back; the charred spar-gad with which the lines had been written
lay on the ground beneath the wall. Feeling pretty sure that
Winterborne would observe her action, she quickly went up to the
wall, rubbed out "lose" and inserted "keep" in its stead. Then
she made the best of her way home without looking behind her.
Giles could draw an inference now if he chose.

There could not be the least doubt that gentle Grace was warming
to more sympathy with, and interest in, Giles Winterborne than
ever she had done while he was her promised lover; that since his
misfortune those social shortcomings of his, which contrasted so
awkwardly with her later experiences of life, had become obscured
by the generous revival of an old romantic attachment to him.
Though mentally trained and tilled into foreignness of view, as
compared with her youthful time, Grace was not an ambitious girl,
and might, if left to herself, have declined Winterborne without
much discontent or unhappiness. Her feelings just now were so far
from latent that the writing on the wall had thus quickened her to
an unusual rashness.

Having returned from her walk she sat at breakfast silently. When
her step-mother had left the room she said to her father, "I have