Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer Oliver's

skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne, brought Grace Melbury to

the morning of the next day. It was fine. A north wind was

blowing--that not unacceptable compromise between the atmospheric

cutlery of the eastern blast and the spongy gales of the west quarter.

She looked from her window in the direction of the light of the

previous evening, and could just discern through the trees the shape of

the surgeon's house. Somehow, in the broad, practical daylight, that

unknown and lonely gentleman seemed to be shorn of much of the interest

which had invested his personality and pursuits in the hours of

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darkness, and as Grace's dressing proceeded he faded from her mind.

Meanwhile, Winterborne, though half assured of her father's favor, was

rendered a little restless by Miss Melbury's behavior. Despite his dry

self-control, he could not help looking continually from his own door

towards the timber-merchant's, in the probability of somebody's

emergence therefrom. His attention was at length justified by the

appearance of two figures, that of Mr. Melbury himself, and Grace

beside him. They stepped out in a direction towards the densest

quarter of the wood, and Winterborne walked contemplatively behind

them, till all three were soon under the trees.

Although the time of bare boughs had now set in, there were sheltered

hollows amid the Hintock plantations and copses in which a more tardy

leave-taking than on windy summits was the rule with the foliage. This

caused here and there an apparent mixture of the seasons; so that in

some of the dells that they passed by holly-berries in full red were

found growing beside oak and hazel whose leaves were as yet not far

removed from green, and brambles whose verdure was rich and deep as in

the month of August. To Grace these well-known peculiarities were as

an old painting restored.

Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which

the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months.

Angles were taking the place of curves, and reticulations of

surfaces--a change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the

primitive on Nature's canvas, and comparable to a retrogressive step

from the art of an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific

Islander.

Winterborne followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as they

threaded their way through these sylvan phenomena. Mr. Melbury's long

legs, and gaiters drawn in to the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop,

his habit of getting lost in thought and arousing himself with an

exclamation of "Hah!" accompanied with an upward jerk of the head,

composed a personage recognizable by his neighbors as far as he could

be seen. It seemed as if the squirrels and birds knew him. One of the

former would occasionally run from the path to hide behind the arm of

some tree, which the little animal carefully edged round pari passu

with Melbury and his daughters movement onward, assuming a mock manner,

as though he were saying, "Ho, ho; you are only a timber-merchant, and

carry no gun!"




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