Giles knew nothing of legal procedure, but he did know that for him to step up to Grace as a lover before the bond which bound her was actually dissolved was simply an extravagant dream of her father's overstrained mind.

He pitied Melbury for his almost childish enthusiasm, and saw that the aging man must have suffered acutely to be weakened to this unreasoning desire.
Winterborne was far too magnanimous to harbor any cynical conjecture that the timber-merchant, in his intense affection for Grace, was courting him now because that young lady, when disunited, would be left in an anomalous position, to escape which a bad husband was better than none.

He felt quite sure that his old friend was simply on tenterhooks of anxiety to repair the almost irreparable error of dividing two whom Nature had striven to join together in earlier days, and that in his ardor to do this he was oblivious of formalities.

The cautious supervision of his past years had overleaped itself at last.

Hence, Winterborne perceived that, in this new beginning, the necessary care not to compromise Grace by too early advances must be exercised by himself.
Perhaps Winterborne was not quite so ardent as heretofore.