the evening sun, amid which bounding girls, gracefully clad in
artistic arrangements of blue, brown, red, black, and white, were
playing at games, with laughter and chat, in all the pride of
life, the notes of piano and harp trembling in the air from the
open windows adjoining. Moreover, they were girls--and this was a
fact which Grace Melbury's delicate femininity could not lose
sight of--whose parents Giles would have addressed with a
deferential Sir or Madam. Beside this visioned scene the homely
farmsteads did not quite hold their own from her present twenty-
year point of survey. For all his woodland sequestration, Giles
knew the primitive simplicity of the subject he had started, and
now sounded a deeper note.

"'Twas very odd what we said to each other years ago; I often
think of it. I mean our saying that if we still liked each other
when you were twenty and I twenty-five, we'd--"

"It was child's tattle."

"H'm!" said Giles, suddenly.

"I mean we were young," said she, more considerately. That gruff
manner of his in making inquiries reminded her that he was
unaltered in much.

"Yes....I beg your pardon, Miss Melbury; your father SENT me to
meet you to-day."

"I know it, and I am glad of it."