His attention was at length justified by the appearance of two figures, that of Mr.Melbury himself, and Grace beside him.

They stepped out in a direction towards the densest quarter of the wood, and Winterborne walked contemplatively behind them, till all three were soon under the trees.
Although the time of bare boughs had now set in, there were sheltered hollows amid the Hintock plantations and copses in which a more tardy leave-taking than on windy summits was the rule with the foliage.

This caused here and there an apparent mixture of the seasons; so that in some of the dells that they passed by holly-berries in full red were found growing beside oak and hazel whose leaves were as yet not far removed from green, and brambles whose verdure was rich and deep as in the month of August.

To Grace these well-known peculiarities were as an old painting restored.
Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months.
Angles were taking the place of curves, and reticulations of surfaces--a change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the primitive on Nature's canvas, and comparable to a retrogressive step from the art of an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific Islander.
Winterborne followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as they threaded their way through these sylvan phenomena.

Mr.Melbury's long legs, and gaiters drawn in to the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop, his habit of getting lost in thought and arousing himself with an exclamation of "Hah!" accompanied with an upward jerk of the head, composed a personage recognizable by his neighbors as far as he could be seen.