Chapter 38

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

At these warm words Winterborne was not less dazed than he was
moved in heart. The novelty of the avowal rendered what it
carried with it inapprehensible by him in its entirety.

Only a few short months ago completely estranged from this family--
beholding Grace going to and fro in the distance, clothed with
the alienating radiance of obvious superiority, the wife of the
then popular and fashionable Fitzpiers, hopelessly outside his
social boundary down to so recent a time that flowers then folded
were hardly faded yet--he was now asked by that jealously guarding
father of hers to take courage--to get himself ready for the day
when he should be able to claim her.

The old times came back to him in dim procession. How he had been
snubbed; how Melbury had despised his Christmas party; how that
sweet, coy Grace herself had looked down upon him and his
household arrangements, and poor Creedle's contrivances!

Well, he could not believe it. Surely the adamantine barrier of
marriage with another could not be pierced like this! It did
violence to custom. Yet a new law might do anything. But was it
at all within the bounds of probability that a woman who, over and
above her own attainments, had been accustomed to those of a
cultivated professional man, could ever be the wife of such as he?

Since the date of his rejection he had almost grown to see the
reasonableness of that treatment. He had said to himself again
and again that her father was right; that the poor ceorl, Giles
Winterborne, would never have been able to make such a dainty girl
happy. Yet, now that she had stood in a position farther removed
from his own than at first, he was asked to prepare to woo her.
He was full of doubt.

Nevertheless, it was not in him to show backwardness. To act so
promptly as Melbury desired him to act seemed, indeed, scarcely
wise, because of the uncertainty of events. Giles knew nothing of
legal procedure, but he did know that for him to step up to Grace
as a lover before the bond which bound her was actually dissolved
was simply an extravagant dream of her father's overstrained mind.
He pitied Melbury for his almost childish enthusiasm, and saw that
the aging man must have suffered acutely to be weakened to this
unreasoning desire.

Winterborne was far too magnanimous to harbor any cynical
conjecture that the timber-merchant, in his intense affection for
Grace, was courting him now because that young lady, when
disunited, would be left in an anomalous position, to escape which
a bad husband was better than none. He felt quite sure that his
old friend was simply on tenterhooks of anxiety to repair the
almost irreparable error of dividing two whom Nature had