soften it.

"I have had another letter from my father," she hastened to continue.
"He thinks he may come home this evening. And--in view of his
hopes--it will grieve him if there is any little difference between us,
Giles."

"There is none," he said, sadly regarding her from the face downward as
he pondered how to lay the cruel truth bare.

"Still--I fear you have not quite forgiven me about my being
uncomfortable at the inn."

"I have, Grace, I'm sure."

"But you speak in quite an unhappy way," she returned, coming up close
to him with the most winning of the many pretty airs that appertained
to her. "Don't you think you will ever be happy, Giles?"

He did not reply for some instants. "When the sun shines on the north
front of Sherton Abbey--that's when my happiness will come to me!" said
he, staring as it were into the earth.

"But--then that means that there is something more than my offending
you in not liking The Three Tuns. If it is because I--did not like to
let you kiss me in the Abbey--well, you know, Giles, that it was not on
account of my cold feelings, but because I did certainly, just then,
think it was rather premature, in spite of my poor father. That was
the true reason--the sole one. But I do not want to be hard--God knows
I do not," she said, her voice fluctuating. "And perhaps--as I am on
the verge of freedom--I am not right, after all, in thinking there is
any harm in your kissing me."

"Oh God!" said Winterborne within himself. His head was turned askance
as he still resolutely regarded the ground. For the last several
minutes he had seen this great temptation approaching him in regular
siege; and now it had come. The wrong, the social sin, of now taking
advantage of the offer of her lips had a magnitude, in the eyes of one
whose life had been so primitive, so ruled by purest household laws, as
Giles's, which can hardly be explained.

"Did you say anything?" she asked, timidly.

"Oh no--only that--"

"You mean that it must BE settled, since my father is coming home?" she
said, gladly.

Winterborne, though fighting valiantly against himself all this
while--though he would have protected Grace's good repute as the apple
of his eye--was a man; and, as Desdemona said, men are not gods. In
face of the agonizing seductiveness shown by her, in her unenlightened
school-girl simplicity about the laws and ordinances, he betrayed a
man's weakness. Since it was so--since it had come t