away from Marty, his face simultaneously kindling with recognition
and surprise. She followed his gaze, and saw walking across to
him a flexible young creature in whom she perceived the features
of her she had known as Miss Grace Melbury, but now looking
glorified and refined above her former level. Winterborne, being
fixed to the spot by his apple-tree, could not advance to meet
her; he held out his spare hand with his hat in it, and with some
embarrassment beheld her coming on tiptoe through the mud to the
middle of the square where he stood.

Miss Melbury's arrival so early was, as Marty could see,
unexpected by Giles, which accounted for his not being ready to
receive her. Indeed, her father had named five o'clock as her
probable time, for which reason that hour had been looming out all
the day in his forward perspective, like an important edifice on a
plain. Now here she was come, he knew not how, and his arranged
welcome stultified.

His face became gloomy at her necessity for stepping into the
road, and more still at the little look of embarrassment which
appeared on hers at having to perform the meeting with him under
an apple-tree ten feet high in the middle of the market-place.
Having had occasion to take off the new gloves she had bought to
come home in, she held out to him a hand graduating from pink at
the tips of the fingers to white at the palm; and the reception
formed a scene, with the tree over their heads, which was not by
any means an ordinary one in Sherton Abbas streets.

Nevertheless, the greeting on her looks and lips was of a
restrained type, which perhaps was not unnatural. For true it was