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.