The Woodlanders - Page 33/314

Meanwhile, Winterborne and Grace Melbury had also undergone their

little experiences of the same homeward journey.

As he drove off with her out of the town the glances of people fell

upon them, the younger thinking that Mr. Winterborne was in a pleasant

place, and wondering in what relation he stood towards her.

Winterborne himself was unconscious of this. Occupied solely with the

idea of having her in charge, he did not notice much with outward eye,

neither observing how she was dressed, nor the effect of the picture

they together composed in the landscape.

Their conversation was in briefest phrase for some time, Grace being

somewhat disconcerted, through not having understood till they were

about to start that Giles was to be her sole conductor in place of her

father. When they were in the open country he spoke.

"Don't Brownley's farm-buildings look strange to you, now they have

been moved bodily from the hollow where the old ones stood to the top

of the hill?"

She admitted that they did, though she should not have seen any

difference in them if he had not pointed it out.

"They had a good crop of bitter-sweets; they couldn't grind them all"

(nodding towards an orchard where some heaps of apples had been left

lying ever since the ingathering).

She said "Yes," but looking at another orchard.

"Why, you are looking at John-apple-trees! You know bitter-sweets--you

used to well enough!"

"I am afraid I have forgotten, and it is getting too dark to

distinguish."

Winterborne did not continue. It seemed as if the knowledge and

interest which had formerly moved Grace's mind had quite died away from

her. He wondered whether the special attributes of his image in the

past had evaporated like these other things.

However that might be, the fact at present was merely this, that where

he was seeing John-apples and farm-buildings she was beholding a far

remoter scene--a scene no less innocent and simple, indeed, but much

contrasting--a broad lawn in the fashionable suburb of a fast city, the

evergreen leaves shining in 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.