He regarded her with a slight smile, weighing, not her speech, but
the question whether he should tell her that she had been watched.
He decided in the negative.

"You have been to the house?" he said. "But I need not ask." The
fact was that there shone upon Miss Melbury's face a species of
exaltation, which saw no environing details nor his own
occupation; nothing more than his bare presence.

"Why need you not ask?"

"Your face is like the face of Moses when he came down from the
Mount."

She reddened a little and said, "How can you be so profane, Giles
Winterborne?"

"How can you think so much of that class of people? Well, I beg
pardon; I didn't mean to speak so freely. How do you like her
house and her?"

"Exceedingly. I had not been inside the walls since I was a
child, when it used to be let to strangers, before Mrs. Charmond's
late husband bought the property. She is SO nice!" And Grace fell
into such an abstracted gaze at the imaginary image of Mrs.
Charmond and her niceness that it almost conjured up a vision of
that lady in mid-air before them.

"She has only been here a month or two, it seems, and cannot stay
much longer, because she finds it so lonely and damp in winter.