of the foliage would hardly have changed. Everything
was so much as usual that no itinerant stranger would have supposed a
woman's fate to be hanging in the balance at that summer's decline.

But there were preparations, imaginable readily enough by those who had
special knowledge. In the remote and fashionable town of Sandbourne
something was growing up under the hands of several persons who had
never seen Grace Melbury, never would see her, or care anything about
her at all, though their creation had such interesting relation to her
life that it would enclose her very heart at a moment when that heart
would beat, if not with more emotional ardor, at least with more
emotional turbulence than at any previous time.

Why did Mrs. Dollery's van, instead of passing along at the end of the
smaller village to Great Hintock direct, turn one Saturday night into
Little Hintock Lane, and never pull up till it reached Mr. Melbury's
gates? The gilding shine of evening fell upon a large, flat box not
less than a yard square, and safely tied with cord, as it was handed
out from under the tilt with a great deal of care. But it was not
heavy for its size; Mrs. Dollery herself carried it into the house.
Tim Tangs, the hollow-turner, Bawtree, Suke Damson, and others, looked
knowing, and made remarks to each other as they watched its entrance.
Melbury stood at the door of the timber-shed in the attitude of a man
to whom such an arrival was a trifling domestic detail with which he
did not condescend to be concerned. Yet he well divined the contents
of that box, and was in truth all the while in a pleasant exaltation at
the proof that thus far, at any rate, no disappointment had supervened.
While Mrs. Dollery remained--which was rather long, from her sense of
the importance of her errand--he went into the out-house; but as soon
as she had had her say, been paid, and had rumbled away, he entered the
dwelling, to find there what he knew he should find--his wife and
daughter in a flutter of excitement over the wedding-gown, just arrived
from the leading dress-maker of Sandbourne watering-place aforesaid.

During these weeks Giles Winterborne was nowhere to be seen or heard
of. At the close of his tenure in Hintock he had sold some of his
furniture, packed up the rest--a few pieces endeared by associations,
or necessary to his occupation--in the house of a friendly neighbor,
and gone away. People said that a certain laxity had crept in