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 made up
my mind that I should like my engagement to Giles to continue, for the
present at any rate, till I can see further what I ought to do."
Melbury looked much surprised.
"Nonsense," he said, sharply. "You don't know what you are talking
about. Look here."
He handed across to her the letter received from Giles.
She read it, and said no more. Could he have seen her write on the
wall? She did not know. Fate, it seemed, would have it this way, and
there was nothing to do but to acquiesce.
It was a few hours after this that Winterborne, who, curiously enough,
had NOT perceived Grace writing, was clearing away the tree from the
front of South's late dwelling. He saw Marty standing in her door-way,
a slim figure in meagre black, almost without womanly contours as yet.
He went up to her and said, "Marty, why did you write that on my wall
last night? It WAS you, you know."