"I am afraid I have forgotten, and it is getting too dark to
distinguish."

Winterborne did not continue. It seemed as if the knowledge and
interest which had formerly moved Grace's mind had quite died away from
her. He wondered whether the special attributes of his image in the
past had evaporated like these other things.

However that might be, the fact at present was merely this, that where
he was seeing John-apples and farm-buildings she was beholding a far
remoter scene--a scene no less innocent and simple, indeed, but much
contrasting--a broad lawn in the fashionable suburb of a fast city, the
evergreen leaves shining in the evening sun, amid which bounding girls,
gracefully clad in artistic arrangements of blue, brown, red, black,
and white, were playing at games, with laughter and chat, in all the
pride of life, the notes of piano and harp trembling in the air from
the open windows adjoining. Moreover, they were girls--and this was a
fact which Grace Melbury's delicate femininity could not lose sight
of--whose parents Giles would have addressed with a deferential Sir or
Madam. Beside this visioned scene the homely farmsteads did not quite
hold their own from her present twenty-year point of survey. For all
his woodland sequestration, Giles knew the primitive simplicity of the
subject he had started, and now sounded a deeper note.

"'Twas very odd what we said to each other years ago; I often think of
it. I mean our saying that if we still liked each other when you were
twenty and I twenty-five, we'd--"