The Woodlanders

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 striven to join together in earlier days, and that in his

ardor to do this he was oblivious of formalities. The cautious

supervision of his past years had overleaped itself at last. Hence,

Winterborne perceived that, in this new beginning, the necessary care

not to compromise Grace by too early advances must be exercised by

himself.