Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII.

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 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