the building. Suddenly Mr. Melbury paused, turned ill upon
the grass, and approached a particular headstone, where he read, "In
memory of John Winterborne," with the subjoined date and age. It was
the grave of Giles's father.

The timber-merchant laid his hand upon the stone, and was humanized.
"Jack, my wronged friend!" he said. "I'll be faithful to my plan of
making amends to 'ee."

When he reached home that evening, he said to Grace and Mrs. Melbury,
who were working at a little table by the fire,

"Giles wants us to go down and spend an hour with him the day after
to-morrow; and I'm thinking, that as 'tis Giles who asks us, we'll go."

They assented without demur, and accordingly the timber-merchant sent
Giles the next morning an answer in the affirmative.

Winterborne, in his modesty, or indifference, had mentioned no
particular hour in his invitation; and accordingly Mr. Melbury and his
family, expecting no other guests, chose their own time, which chanced
to be rather early in the afternoon, by reason of the somewhat quicker
despatch than usual of the timber-merchant's business that day. To
show their sense of the unimportance of the occasion, they walked quite
slowly to the house, as if they were merely out for a ramble, and going
to nothing special at all; or at most intending to pay a casual call
and take a cup of tea.

At this hour stir and bustle pervaded the interior of Winterborne's
domicile from cellar to apple-loft. He had planned an elaborate high
tea for six o'clock or thereabouts, and a good roaring supper to come
on about eleven. Being a bachelor of rather retiring habits, the whole
of the preparations devolved upon himself and his trusty man and
familiar, Robert Creedle, who did everything that required doing, from
making Giles's bed to catching moles in his field. He was a survival
from the days when Giles's father held the homestead, and Giles was a
playing boy.

These two, with a certain dilatoriousness which appertained to both,
were now in the heat of preparation in the bake-house, expecting nobody
before six o'clock. Winterborne was standing before the brick oven in
his shirt-sleeves, tossing in thorn sprays, and stirring about the
blazing mass with a long-handled, three-pronged Beelzebub kind of fork,
the heat shining out upon his streaming face and making his eyes like
furnaces, the thorns crackling and sputtering; while Creedle, having
ranged the pastry dishes in a row o