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--" "It was child's tattle." "H'm!" said Giles, suddenly.
"I mean we were young," said she, more considerately.

That gruff manner of his in making inquiries reminded her that he was unaltered in much.
"Yes....I beg your pardon, Miss Melbury; your father SENT me to meet you to-day." "I know it, and I am glad of it." He seemed satisfied with her tone and went on: "At that time you were sitting beside me at the back of your father's covered car, when we were coming home from gypsying, all the party being squeezed in together as tight as sheep in an auction-pen.