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MARCELLA

by

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Author of Robert Elsmere, The History Of David Grieve, etc.

In Two Volumes

1894

[Illustration: Portrait of Mary A. Ward]

TO MY FATHER I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE

BOOK I.

"If nature put not forth her power
About the opening of the flower,
Who is it that could live an hour?"

CHAPTER I.

"The mists—and the sun—and the first streaks of yellow in the beeches—beautiful!—beautiful!"

And with a long breath of delight Marcella Boyce threw herself on her knees by the window she had just opened, and, propping her face upon her hands, devoured the scene, before her with that passionate intensity of pleasure which had been her gift and heritage through life.

She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees—some Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two—groups where the slow selective hand of time had been at work for generations, developing here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing black against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last in a far distant gap where a gate—and a gate of some importance—clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried with them a confused general impression of well-being and of dignity. Marcella drew it in—this impression—with avidity. Yet at the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.

"It is a heavenly place, all said and done," she protested to herself with a little frown. "But no doubt it would have been better still if Uncle Robert had looked after it and we could afford to keep the garden decent. Still—"

She dropped on a stool beside the open window, and as her eyes steeped themselves afresh in what they saw, the frown disappeared again in the former look of glowing content—that content of youth which is never merely passive, nay, rather, contains an invariable element of covetous eagerness.

It was but three months or so since Marcella's father, Mr. Richard Boyce, had succeeded to the ownership of Mellor Park the old home of the Boyces, and it was little more than six weeks since Marcella had received her summons home from the students' boarding-house in Kensington, where she had been lately living. She had ardently wished to assist in the June "settling-in," having not been able to apply her mind to the music or painting she was supposed to be studying, nor indeed to any other subject whatever, since the news of their inheritance had reached her. But her mother in a dry little note had let it be known that she preferred to manage the move for herself. Marcella had better go on with her studies as long as possible.

Yet Marcella was here at last. And as she looked round her large bare room, with its old dilapidated furniture, and then out again to woods and lawns, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out—atoned for by this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so deplorably!—since no one could have reasonably expected that an apparently sound man of sixty would have succumbed in three days to the sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted successfully a score of times before.

Her great desire now was to put the past—the greater part of it at any rate—behind her altogether. Its shabby worries were surely done with, poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present position. At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl, paid for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket-money, and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or fancied slur; she was no longer even the half-Bohemian student of these past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity of keeping her boarding-house expenses down to the lowest possible figure would allow. She was something altogether different. She was Marcella Boyce, a "finished" and grown-up young woman of twenty-one, the only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mellor Park, inheritress of one of the most ancient names in Midland England, and just entering on a life which to her own fancy and will, at any rate, promised the highest possible degree of interest and novelty.

Yet, in the very act of putting her past away from her, she only succeeded, so it seemed, in inviting it to repossess her.

For against her will, she fell straightway—in this quiet of the autumn morning—into a riot of memory, setting her past self against her present more consciously than she had done yet, recalling scene after scene and stage after stage with feelings of sarcasm, or amusement, or disgust, which showed themselves freely as they came and went, in the fine plastic face turned to the September woods.

She had been at school since she was nine years old—there was the dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which, in her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, of a house in London, of a large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice of her, of games, little friends, and birthday parties. What had led to the complete disappearance of this earliest "set," to use a theatrical phrase, from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet adequately know, though she had some theories and many suspicions in the background of her mind. But at any rate this first image of memory was succeeded by another precise as the first was vague—the image of a tall white house, set against a white chalk cliff rising in terraces behind it and alongside it, where she had spent the years from nine to fourteen, and where, if she were set down blindfold, now, at twenty-one, she could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and stair with a perfect and fascinated familiarity.

When she entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home life she had been an average child of the quick and clever type, with average faults. But something in the bare, ugly rooms, the discipline, the teaching, the companionship of Miss Frederick's Cliff House School for Young Ladies, transformed little Marcella Boyce, for the time being, into a demon. She hated her lessons, though, when she chose, she could do them in a hundredth part of the time taken by her companions; she hated getting up in the wintry dark, and her cold ablutions with some dozen others in the comfortless lavatory; she hated the meals in the long schoolroom, where, because twice meat was forbidden and twice pudding allowed, she invariably hungered fiercely for more mutton and scorned her second course, making a sort of dramatic story to herself out of Miss Frederick's tyranny and her own thwarted appetite as she sat black-browed and brooding in her place. She was not a favourite with her companions, and she was a perpetual difficulty and trouble to her perfectly well-intentioned schoolmistress. The whole of her first year was one continual series of sulks, quarrels, and revolts.

Perhaps her blackest days were the days she spent occasionally in bed, when Miss Frederick, at her wit's end, would take advantage of one of the child's perpetual colds to try the effects of a day's seclusion and solitary confinement, administered in such a form that it could do her charge no harm, and might, she hoped, do her good. "For I do believe a great part of it's liver or nerves! No child in her right senses could behave so," she would declare to the mild and stout French lady who had been her partner for years, and who was more inclined to befriend and excuse Marcella than any one else in the house—no one exactly knew why.

Now the rule of the house when any girl was ordered to bed with a cold was, in the first place, that she should not put her arms outside the bedclothes—for if you were allowed to read and amuse yourself in bed you might as well be up; that the housemaid should visit the patient in the early morning with a cup of senna-tea, and at long and regular intervals throughout the day with beef-tea and gruel; and that no one should come to see and talk with her, unless, indeed, it were the doctor, quiet being in all cases of sickness the first condition of recovery, and the natural schoolgirl in Miss Frederick's persuasion being more or less inclined to complain without cause if illness were made agreeable.

For some fourteen hours, therefore, on these days of durance Marcella was left almost wholly alone, nothing but a wild mass of black hair and a pair of roving, defiant eyes in a pale face showing above the bedclothes whenever the housemaid chose to visit her—a pitiable morsel, in truth, of rather forlorn humanity. For though she had her movements of fierce revolt, when she was within an ace of throwing the senna-tea in Martha's face, and rushing downstairs in her nightgown to denounce Miss Frederick in the midst of an astonished schoolroom, something generally interposed; not conscience, it is to be feared, or any wish "to be good," but only an aching, inmost sense of childish loneliness and helplessness; a perception that she had indeed tried everybody's patience to the limit, and that these days in bed represented crises which must be borne with even by such a rebel as Marcie Boyce.

So she submitted, and presently learnt, under dire stress of boredom, to amuse herself a good deal by developing a natural capacity for dreaming awake. Hour by hour she followed out an endless story of which she was always the heroine. Before the annoyance of her afternoon gruel, which she loathed, was well forgotten, she was in full fairy-land again, figuring generally as the trusted friend and companion of the Princess of Wales—of that beautiful Alexandra, the top and model of English society whose portrait in the window of the little stationer's shop at Marswell—the small country town near Cliff House—had attracted the child's attention once, on a dreary walk, and had ever since governed her dreams. Marcella had no fairy-tales, but she spun a whole cycle for herself around the lovely Princess who came to seem to her before long her own particular property. She had only to shut her eyes and she had caught her idol's attention—either by some look or act of passionate yet unobtrusive homage as she passed the royal carriage in the street—or by throwing herself in front of the divinity's runaway horses—or by a series of social steps easily devised by an imaginative child, well aware, in spite of appearances, that she was of an old family and had aristocratic relations. Then, when the Princess had held out a gracious hand and smiled, all was delight! Marcella grew up on the instant: she was beautiful, of course; she had, so people said, the "Boyce eyes and hair;" she had sweeping gowns, generally of white muslin with cherry-coloured ribbons; she went here and there with the Princess, laughing and talking quite calmly with the greatest people in the land, her romantic friendship with the adored of England making her all the time the observed of all observers, bringing her a thousand delicate flatteries and attentions.

Then, when she was at the very top of ecstasy, floating in the softest summer sea of fancy, some little noise would startle her into opening her eyes, and there beside her in the deepening dusk would be the bare white beds of her two dormitory companions, the ugly wall-paper opposite, and the uncovered boards with their frugal strips of carpet stretching away on either hand. The tea-bell would ring perhaps in the depths far below, and the sound would complete the transformation of the Princess's maid-of-honour into Marcie Boyce, the plain naughty child, whom nobody cared about, whose mother never wrote to her, who in contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single "party frock," and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her cold was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a page of Ince's "Outlines of English History" in the chilly schoolroom, at seven.

Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child's daily miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social difference between herself and her companions. Some proportion of the girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or three neighbouring towns. Their tradesmen papas were sometimes ready to deal on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of her establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves airs which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider like Marcella Boyce. Even at ten years old she perfectly understood that she was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle had been a famous Speaker of the House of Commons. The portrait of this great-uncle had hung in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed so far away; her father had again and again pointed it out to the child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more than once her childish eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired gentleman who occasionally came to see them, and whom she called "Grandpapa." Through one influence and another she had drawn the glory of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into her childish blood. There they were now—the glory and the dignity—a feverish leaven, driving her perpetually into the most crude and ridiculous outbreaks, which could lead to nothing but humiliation.

"I wish my great-uncle were here! He'd make you remember—you great—you great—big bully you!"—she shrieked on one occasion when she had been defying a big girl in authority, and the big girl—the stout and comely daughter of a local ironmonger—had been successfully asserting herself.

The big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed.

"Your great-uncle! Upon my word! And who may he be, miss? If it comes to that, I'd like to show my great-uncle David how you've scratched my wrist. He'd give it you. He's almost as strong as father, though he is so old. You get along with you, and behave yourself, and don't talk stuff to me."

Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself pushed out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her. She rushed up to the top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in a hidden niche of the wall, shaking and crying,—now planning vengeance on her conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection of her own ill-bred and impotent folly.

No—during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory declared, were three: the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday—Marcella sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly allowance; the mad games of "tig," which she led and organised in the top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Rénier, Miss Frederick's partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small sister of her own, and surreptitiously indulged "the little wild-cat," as the school generally dubbed the Speaker's great-niece, whenever she could.

But with the third year fresh elements and interests had entered in. Romance awoke, and with it certain sentimental affections. In the first place, a taste for reading had rooted itself—reading of the adventurous and poetical kind. There were two or three books which Marcella had absorbed in a way it now made her envious to remember. For at twenty-one people who take interest in many things, and are in a hurry to have opinions, must skim and "turn over" books rather than read them, must use indeed as best they may a scattered and distracted mind, and suffer occasional pangs of conscience as pretenders. But at thirteen—what concentration! what devotion! what joy! One of these precious volumes was Bulwer's "Rienzi"; another was Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs"; a third was a little red volume of "Marmion" which an aunt had given her. She probably never read any of them through—she had not a particle of industry or method in her composition—but she lived in them. The parts which it bored her to read she easily invented for herself, but the scenes and passages which thrilled her she knew by heart; she had no gift for verse-making, but she laboriously wrote a long poem on the death of Rienzi, and she tried again and again with a not inapt hand to illustrate for herself in pen and ink the execution of Wallace.

But all these loves for things and ideas were soon as nothing in comparison with a friendship, and an adoration.

To take the adoration first. When Marcella came to Cliff House she was recommended by the same relation who gave her "Marmion" to the kind offices of the clergyman of the parish, who happened to be known to some of the Boyce family. He and his wife—they had no children—did their duty amply by the odd undisciplined child. They asked her to tea once or twice; they invited her to the school-treat, where she was only self-conscious and miserably shy; and Mr. Ellerton had at least one friendly and pastoral talk with Miss Frederick as to the difficulties of her pupil's character. For a long time little came of it. Marcella was hard to tame, and when she went to tea at the Rectory Mrs. Ellerton, who was refined and sensible, did not know what to make of her, though in some unaccountable way she was drawn to and interested by the child. But with the expansion of her thirteenth year there suddenly developed in Marcie's stormy breast an overmastering absorbing passion for these two persons. She did not show it to them much, but for herself it raised her to another plane of existence, gave her new objects and new standards. She who had hated going to church now counted time entirely by Sundays. To see the pulpit occupied by any other form and face than those of the rector was a calamity hardly to be borne; if the exit of the school party were delayed by any accident so that Mr. and Mrs. Ellerton overtook them in the churchyard, Marcella would walk home on air, quivering with a passionate delight, and in the dreary afternoon of the school Sunday she would spend her time happily in trying to write down the heads of Mr. Ellerton's sermon. In the natural course of things she would, at this time, have taken no interest in such things at all, but whatever had been spoken by him had grace, thrill, meaning.

Nor was the week quite barren of similar delights. She was generally sent to practise on an old square piano in one of the top rooms. The window in front of her overlooked the long white drive and the distant high road into which it ran. Three times a week on an average Mrs. Ellerton's pony carriage might be expected to pass along that road. Every day Marcella watched for it, alive with expectation, her fingers strumming as they pleased. Then with the first gleam of the white pony in the distance, over would go the music stool, and the child leapt to the window, remaining fixed there, breathing quick and eagerly till the trees on the left had hidden from her the graceful erect figure of Mrs. Ellerton. Then her moment of Paradise was over; but the afterglow of it lasted for the day.

So much for romance, for feelings as much like love as childhood can know them, full of kindling charm and mystery. Her friendship had been of course different, but it also left deep mark. A tall, consumptive girl among the Cliff House pupils, the motherless daughter of a clergyman-friend of Miss Frederick's, had for some time taken notice of Marcella, and at length won her by nothing else, in the first instance, than a remarkable gift for story-telling. She was a parlour-boarder, had a room to herself, and a fire in it when the weather was cold. She was not held strictly to lesson hours; many delicacies in the way of food were provided for her, and Miss Frederick watched over her with a quite maternal solicitude. When winter came she developed a troublesome cough, and the doctor recommended that a little suite of rooms looking south and leading out on the middle terrace of the garden should be given up to her. There was a bedroom, an intermediate dressing-room, and then a little sitting-room built out upon the terrace, with a window-door opening upon it.

Here Mary Lant spent week after week. Whenever lesson hours were done she clamoured for Marcie Boyce, and Marcella was always eager to go to her. She would fly up stairs and passages, knock at the bedroom door, run down the steps to the queer little dressing-room where the roof nearly came on your head, and down more steps again to the sitting-room. Then when the door was shut, and she was crooning over the fire with her friend, she was entirely happy. The tiny room was built on the edge of the terrace, the ground fell rapidly below it, and the west window commanded a broad expanse of tame arable country, of square fields and hedges, and scattered wood. Marcella, looking back upon that room, seemed always to see it flooded with the rays of wintry sunset, a kettle boiling on the fire, her pale friend in a shawl crouching over the warmth, and the branches of a snowberry tree, driven by the wind, beating against the terrace door.

But what a story-teller was Mary Lant! She was the inventor of a story called "John and Julia," which went on for weeks and months without ever producing the smallest satiety in Marcella. Unlike her books of adventure, this was a domestic drama of the purest sort; it was extremely moral and evangelical, designed indeed by its sensitively religious author for Marcie's correction and improvement. There was in it a sublime hero, who set everybody's faults to rights and lectured the heroine. In real life Marcella would probably before long have been found trying to kick his shins—a mode of warfare of which in her demon moods she was past mistress. But as Mary Lant described him, she not only bore with and trembled before him—she adored him. The taste for him and his like, as well as for the story-teller herself—a girl of a tremulous, melancholy fibre, sweet-natured, possessed by a Calvinist faith, and already prescient of death—grew upon her. Soon her absorbing desire was to be altogether shut up with Mary, except on Sundays and at practising times. For this purpose she gave herself the worst cold she could achieve, and cherished diligently what she proudly considered to be a racking cough. But Miss Frederick was deaf to the latter, and only threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and senna-tea for the former, whereupon Marcella in alarm declared that her cold was much better and gave up the cough in despair. It was her first sorrow and cost her some days of pale brooding and silence, and some nights of stifled tears, when during an Easter holiday a letter from Miss Frederick to her mother announced the sudden death of Mary Lant.

CHAPTER II.

Friendship and love are humanising things, and by her fourteenth year Marcella was no longer a clever little imp, but a fast-maturing and in some ways remarkable girl, with much of the woman in her already. She had begun even to feel an interest in her dress, to speculate occasionally on her appearance. At the fourth breaking-up party after her arrival at Cliff House, Marcella, who had usually figured on these occasions in a linsey-woolsey high to the throat, amid the frilled and sashed splendours of her companions, found lying on her bed, when she went up with the others to dress, a plain white muslin dress with blue ribbons. It was the gift of old Mademoiselle Rénier, who affectionately wished her queer, neglected favourite to look well. Marcella examined it and fingered it with an excited mixture of feelings. First of all there was the sore and swelling bitterness that she should owe such things to the kindness of the French governess, whereas finery for the occasion had been freely sent to all the other girls from "home." She very nearly turned her back upon the bed and its pretty burden. But then the mere snowy whiteness of the muslin and freshness of the ribbons, and the burning curiosity to see herself decked therein, overcame a nature which, in the midst of its penury, had been always really possessed by a more than common hunger for sensuous beauty and seemliness. Marcella wore it, was stormily happy in it, and kissed Mademoiselle Rénier for it at night with an effusion, nay, some tears, which no one at Cliff House had ever witnessed in her before except with the accompaniments of rage and fury.

A little later her father came to see her, the first and only visit he paid to her at school. Marcella, to whom he was by now almost a stranger, received him demurely, making no confidences, and took him over the house and gardens. When he was about to leave her a sudden upswell of paternal sentiment made him ask her if she was happy and if she wanted anything.

"Yes!" said Marcella, her large eyes gleaming; "tell mamma I want a 'fringe.' Every other girl in the school has got one."

And she pointed disdainfully to her plainly parted hair. Her father, astonished by her unexpected vehemence, put up his eyeglass and studied the child's appearance. Three days later, by her mother's permission, Marcella was taken to the hairdresser at Marswell by Mademoiselle Rénier, returned in all the glories of a "fringe," and, in acknowledgment thereof, wrote her mother a letter which for the first time had something else than formal news in it.

Meanwhile new destinies were preparing for her. For a variety of small reasons Mr. Boyce, who had never yet troubled himself about the matter from a distance, was not, upon personal inspection, very favourably struck with his daughter's surroundings. His wife remarked shortly, when he complained to her, that Marcella seemed to her as well off as the daughter of persons of their means could expect to be. But Mr. Boyce stuck to his point. He had just learnt that Harold, the only son of his widowed brother Robert, of Mellor Park, had recently developed a deadly disease, which might be long, but must in the end be sure. If the young man died and he outlived Robert, Mellor Park would be his; they would and must return, in spite of certain obstacles, to their natural rank in society, and Marcella must of course be produced as his daughter and heiress. When his wife repulsed him, he went to his eldest sister, an old maid with a small income of her own, who happened to be staying with them, and was the only member of his family with whom he was now on terms. She was struck with his remarks, which bore on family pride, a commodity not always to be reckoned on in the Boyces, but which she herself possessed in abundance; and when he paused she slowly said that if an ideal school of another type could be found for Marcella, she would be responsible for what it might cost over and above the present arrangement. Marcella's manners were certainly rough; it was difficult to say what she was learning, or with whom she was associating; accomplishments she appeared to have none. Something should certainly be done for her—considering the family contingencies. But being a strong evangelical, the aunt stipulated for "religious influences," and said she would write to a friend.

The result was that a month or two later Marcella, now close on her fourteenth birthday, was transferred from Cliff House to the charge of a lady who managed a small but much-sought-after school for young ladies at Solesby, a watering place on the east coast.

* * * * *

But when in the course of reminiscence Marcella found herself once more at Solesby, memory began to halt and wander, to choose another tone and method. At Solesby the rough surroundings and primitive teaching of Cliff House, together with her own burning sense of inferiority and disadvantage, had troubled her no more. She was well taught there, and developed quickly from the troublesome child into the young lady duly broken in to all social proprieties. But it was not her lessons or her dancing masters that she remembered. She had made for herself agitations at Cliff House, but what were they as compared to the agitations of Solesby! Life there had been one long Wertherish romance in which there were few incidents, only feelings, which were themselves events. It contained humiliations and pleasures, but they had been all matters of spiritual relation, connected with one figure only—the figure of her schoolmistress, Miss Pemberton; and with one emotion only—a passion, an adoration, akin to that she had lavished on the Ellertons, but now much more expressive and mature. A tall slender woman with brown, grey-besprinkled hair falling in light curls after the fashion of our grandmothers on either cheek, and braided into a classic knot behind—the face of a saint, an enthusiast—eyes overflowing with feeling above a thin firm mouth—the mouth of the obstinate saint, yet sweet also: this delicate significant picture was stamped on Marcella's heart. What tremors of fear and joy could she not remember in connection with it? what night-vigils when a tired girl kept herself through long hours awake that she might see at last the door open and a figure with a night-lamp standing an instant in the doorway?—for Miss Pemberton, who slept little and read late, never went to rest without softly going the rounds of her pupils' rooms. What storms of contest, mainly provoked by Marcella for the sake of the emotions, first of combat, then of reconciliation to which they led! What a strange development on the pupil's side of a certain histrionic gift, a turn for imaginative intrigue, for endless small contrivances such as might rouse or heighten the recurrent excitements of feeling! What agitated moments of religious talk! What golden days in the holidays, when long-looked-for letters arrived full of religious admonition, letters which were carried about and wept over till they fell to pieces under the stress of such a worship—what terrors and agonies of a stimulated conscience—what remorse for sins committed at school—what zeal to confess them in letters of a passionate eloquence—and what indifference meanwhile to anything of the same sort that might have happened at home!

Strange faculty that women have for thus lavishing their heart's blood from their very cradles! Marcella could hardly look back now, in the quiet of thought, to her five years with Miss Pemberton without a shiver of agitation. Yet now she never saw her. It was two years since they parted; the school was broken up; her idol had gone to India to join a widowed brother. It was all over—for ever. Those precious letters had worn themselves away; so, too, had Marcella's religious feelings; she was once more another being.

* * * * *

But these two years since she had said good-bye to Solesby and her school days? Once set thinking of bygones by the stimulus of Mellor and its novelty, Marcella must needs think, too, of her London life, of all that it had opened to her, and meant for her. Fresh agitations!—fresh passions!—but this time impersonal, passions of the mind and sympathies.

At the time she left Solesby her father and mother were abroad, and it was apparently not convenient that she should join them. Marcella, looking back, could not remember that she had ever been much desired at home. No doubt she had been often moody and tiresome in the holidays; but she suspected—nay, was certain—that there had been other and more permanent reasons why her parents felt her presence with them a burden. At any rate, when the moment came for her to leave Miss Pemberton, her mother wrote from abroad that, as Marcella had of late shown decided aptitude both for music and painting, it would be well that she should cultivate both gifts for a while more seriously than would be possible at home. Mrs. Boyce had made inquiries, and was quite willing that her daughter should go, for a time, to a lady whose address she enclosed, and to whom she herself had written—a lady who received girl-students working at the South Kensington art classes.

So began an experience, as novel as it was strenuous. Marcella soon developed all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two professions. Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed her gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and confident critic of the art of other people—which is much. But though art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and motive-power of her new life—not in art, but in the birth of social and philanthropic ardour, the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social power.

One of her girl-friends and fellow-students had two brothers in London, both at work at South Kensington, and living not far from their sister. The three were orphans. They sprang from a nervous, artistic stock, and Marcella had never before come near any one capable of crowding so much living into the twenty-four hours. The two brothers, both of them skilful and artistic designers in different lines, and hard at work all day, were members of a rising Socialist society, and spent their evenings almost entirely on various forms of social effort and Socialist propaganda. They seemed to Marcella's young eyes absolutely sincere and quite unworldly. They lived as workmen; and both the luxuries and the charities of the rich were equally odious to them. That there could be any "right" in private property or private wealth had become incredible to them; their minds were full of lurid images or resentments drawn from the existing state of London; and though one was humorous and handsome, the other, short, sickly, and pedantic, neither could discuss the Socialist ideal without passion, nor hear it attacked without anger. And in milder measure their sister, who possessed more artistic gift than either of them, was like unto them.

Marcella saw much of these three persons, and something of their friends. She went with them to Socialist lectures, or to the public evenings of the Venturist Society, to which the brothers belonged. Edie, the sister, assaulted the imagination of her friend, made her read the books of a certain eminent poet and artist, once the poet of love and dreamland, "the idle singer of an empty day," now seer and prophet, the herald of an age to come, in which none shall possess, though all shall enjoy. The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason, brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and Lassalle, together with each Venturist pamphlet and essay as it appeared; they flattered her with technical talk; they were full of the importance of women to the new doctrine and the new era.

The handsome brother was certainly in love with her; the other, probably. Marcella was not in love with either of them, but she was deeply interested in all three, and for the sickly brother she felt at that time a profound admiration—nay, reverence—which influenced her vitally at a critical moment of life. "Blessed are the poor"—"Woe unto you, rich men"—these were the only articles of his scanty creed, but they were held with a fervour, and acted upon with a conviction, which our modern religion seldom commands. His influence made Marcella a rent-collector under a lady friend of his in the East End; because of it, she worked herself beyond her strength in a joint attempt made by some members of the Venturist Society to organise a Tailoresses' Union; and, to please him, she read articles and blue-books on Sweating and Overcrowding. It was all very moving and very dramatic; so, too, was the persuasion Marcella divined in her friends, that she was destined in time, with work and experience, to great things and high place in the movement.

The wholly unexpected news of Mr. Boyce's accession to Mellor had very various effects upon this little band of comrades. It revived in Marcella ambitions, instincts and tastes wholly different from those of her companions, but natural to her by temperament and inheritance. The elder brother, Anthony Craven, always melancholy and suspicious, divined her immediately.

"How glad you are to be done with Bohemia!" he said to her ironically one day, when he had just discovered her with the photographs of Mellor about her. "And how rapidly it works!"

"What works?" she asked him angrily.

"The poison of possession. And what a mean end it puts to things! A week ago you were all given to causes not your own; now, how long will it take you to think of us as 'poor fanatics!'—and to be ashamed you ever knew us?"

"You mean to say that I am a mean hypocrite!" she cried. "Do you think that because I delight in—in pretty things and old associations, I must give up all my convictions? Shall I find no poor at Mellor—no work to do? It is unkind—unfair. It is the way all reform breaks down—through mutual distrust!"

He looked at her with a cold smile in his dark, sunken eyes, and she turned from him indignantly.

When they bade her good-bye at the station, she begged them to write to her.

"No, no!" said Louis, the handsome younger brother. "If ever you want us, we are there. If you write, we will answer. But you won't need to think about us yet awhile. Good-bye!"

And he pressed her hand with a smile.

The good fellow had put all his own dreams and hopes out of sight with a firm hand since the arrival of her great news. Indeed, Marcella realised in them all that she was renounced. Louis and Edith spoke with affection and regret. As to Anthony, from the moment that he set eyes upon the maid sent to escort her to Mellor, and the first-class ticket that had been purchased for her, Marcella perfectly understood that she had become to him as an enemy.

"They shall see—I will show them!" she said to herself with angry energy, as the train whirled her away. And her sense of their unwarrantable injustice kept her tense and silent till she was roused to a childish and passionate pleasure by a first sight of the wide lawns and time-stained front of Mellor.

* * * * *

Of such elements, such memories of persons, things, and events, was Marcella's reverie by the window made up. One thing, however, which, clearly, this report of it has not explained, is that spirit of energetic discontent with her past in which she had entered on her musings. Why such soreness of spirit? Her childhood had been pinched and loveless; but, after all, it could well bear comparison with that of many another child of impoverished parents. There had been compensations all through—and were not the great passion of her Solesby days, together with the interest and novelty of her London experience, enough to give zest and glow to the whole retrospect? Ah! but it will be observed that in this sketch of Marcella's schooldays nothing has been said of Marcella's holidays. In this omission the narrative has but followed the hasty, half-conscious gaps and slurs of the girl's own thought. For Marcella never thought of those holidays and all that was connected with them in detail, if she could possibly avoid it. But it was with them, in truth, and with what they implied, that she was so irritably anxious to be done when she first began to be reflective by the window; and it was to them she returned with vague, but still intense consciousness when the rush of active reminiscence died away.

* * * * *

That surely was the breakfast bell ringing, and with the dignified ancestral sound which was still so novel and attractive to Marcella's ear. Recalled to Mellor Park and its circumstances, she went thoughtfully downstairs, pondering a little on the shallow steps of the beautiful Jacobean staircase. Could she ever turn her back upon those holidays? Was she not rather, so to speak, just embarked upon their sequel, or second volume?

But let us go downstairs also.

CHAPTER III.

Breakfast was laid in the "Chinese room," a room which formed part of the stately "garden front," added to the original structure of the house in the eighteenth century by a Boyce whose wife had money. The decorations, especially of the domed and vaulted roof, were supposed by their eighteenth century designer to be "Oriental"; they were, at any rate, intricate and overladen; and the figures of mandarins on the worn and discoloured wall-paper had, at least, top-knots, pigtails, and petticoats to distinguish them from the ordinary Englishmen of 1760, besides a charming mellowness of colour and general effect bestowed on them by time and dilapidation. The marble mantelpiece was elaborately carved in Chinamen and pagodas. There were Chinese curiosities of a miscellaneous kind on the tables, and the beautiful remains of an Indian carpet underfoot. Unluckily, some later Boyce had thrust a crudely Gothic sideboard, with an arched and pillared front, adapted to the purposes of a warming apparatus, into the midst of the mandarins, which disturbed the general effect. But with all its original absurdities, and its modern defacements, the room was a beautiful and stately one. Marcella stepped into it with a slight unconscious straightening of her tall form. It seemed to her that she had never breathed easily till now, in the ample space of these rooms and gardens.

Her father and mother were already at table, together with Mrs. Boyce's brown spaniel Lynn.

Mr. Boyce was employed in ordering about the tall boy in a worn and greasy livery coat, who represented the men-service of the establishment; his wife was talking to her dog, but from the lift of her eyebrows, and the twitching of her thin lips, it was plain to Marcella that her mother was as usual of opinion that her father was behaving foolishly.

"There, for goodness' sake, cut some bread on the sideboard," said the angry master, "and hand it round instead of staring about you like a stuck pig. What they taught you at Sir William Jute's I can't conceive. I didn't undertake to make a man-servant of you, sir."

The pale, harassed lad flew at the bread, cut it with a vast scattering of crumbs, handed it clumsily round, and then took glad advantage of a short supply of coffee to bolt from the room to order more.

"Idiot!" said Mr. Boyce, with an angry frown, as he disappeared.

"If you would allow Ann to do her proper parlour work again," said his wife blandly, "you would, I think, be less annoyed. And as I believe William was boot boy at the Jutes', it is not surprising that he did not learn waiting."

"I tell you, Evelyn, that our position demands a man-servant!" was the hot reply. "None of my family have ever attempted to run this house with women only. It would be unseemly—unfitting—incon—"

"Oh, I am no judge of course of what a Boyce may do!" said his wife carelessly. "I leave that to you and the neighbourhood."

Mr. Boyce looked uncomfortable, cooled down, and presently when the coffee came back asked his wife for a fresh supply in tones from which all bellicosity had for the time departed. He was a small and singularly thin man, with blue wandering eyes under the blackest possible eyebrows and hair. The cheeks were hollow, the complexion as yellow as that of the typical Anglo-Indian. The special character of the mouth was hidden by a fine black moustache, but his prevailing expression varied between irritability and a kind of plaintiveness. The conspicuous blue eyes were as a rule melancholy; but they could be childishly bright and self-assertive. There was a general air of breeding about Richard Boyce, of that air at any rate which our common generalisations connect with the pride of old family; his dress was careful and correct to the last detail; and his hands with their long fingers were of an excessive delicacy, though marred as to beauty by a thinness which nearly amounted to emaciation.

"The servants say they must leave unless the ghost does, Marcella," said Mrs. Boyce, suddenly, laying a morsel of toast as she spoke on Lynn's nose. "Someone from the village of course has been talking—the cook says she heard something last night, though she will not condescend to particulars—and in general it seems to me that you and I may be left before long to do the house work."

"What do they say in the village?" asked Marcella eagerly.

"Oh! they say there was a Boyce two hundred years ago who fled down here from London after doing something he shouldn't—I really forget what. The sheriff's officers were advancing on the house. Their approach displeased him, and he put an end to himself at the head of the little staircase leading from the tapestry-room down to my sitting-room. Why did he choose the staircase?" said Mrs. Boyce with light reflectiveness.

"It won't do," said Marcella, shaking her head. "I know the Boyce they mean. He was a ruffian, but he shot himself in London; and, any way, he was dead long before that staircase was built."

"Dear me, how well up you are!" said her mother. "Suppose you give a little lecture on the family in the servants' hall. Though I never knew a ghost yet that was undone by dates."

There was a satiric detachment in her tone which contrasted sharply with Marcella's amused but sympathetic interest. Detachment was perhaps the characteristic note of Mrs. Boyce's manner,—a curious separateness, as it were, from all the things and human beings immediately about her.

Marcella pondered.

"I shall ask Mr. Harden about the stories," she said presently. "He will have heard them in the village. I am going to the church this morning."

Her mother looked at her—a look of quiet examination—and smiled. The Lady Bountiful airs that Marcella had already assumed during the six weeks she had been in the house entertained Mrs. Boyce exceedingly.

"Harden!" said Mr. Boyce, catching the name. "I wish that man would leave me alone. What have I got to do with a water-supply for the village? It will be as much as ever I can manage to keep a water-tight roof over our heads during the winter after the way in which Robert has behaved."

Marcella's cheek flushed.

"The village water-supply is a disgrace," she said with low emphasis. "I never saw such a crew of unhealthy, wretched-looking children in my life as swarm about those cottages. We take the rent, and we ought to look after them. I believe you could be forced to do something, papa—if the local authority were of any use."

She looked at him defiantly.

"Nonsense," said Mr. Boyce testily. "They got along in your Uncle Robert's days, and they can get along now. Charity, indeed! Why, the state of this house and the pinch for money altogether is enough, I should think, to take a man's mind. Don't you go talking to Mr. Harden in the way you do, Marcella. I don't like it, and I won't have it. You have the interests of your family and your home to think of first."

"Poor starved things!" said Marcella sarcastically—"living in such a den!"

And she swept her white hand round, as though calling to witness the room in which they sat.

"I tell you," said Mr. Boyce, rising and standing before the fire, whence he angrily surveyed the handsome daughter who was in truth so little known to him, and whose nature and aims during the close contact of the last few weeks had become something of a perplexity and disturbance to him,—"I tell you our great effort, the effort of us all, must be to keep up the family position!—our position. Look at that library, and its condition; look at the state of these wall-papers; look at the garden; look at the estate books if it comes to that. Why, it will be years before, even with all my knowledge of affairs, I can pull the thing through—years!"

Mrs. Boyce gave a slight cough—she had pushed back her chair, and was alternately studying her husband and daughter. They might have been actors performing for her amusement. And yet, amusement is not precisely the word. For that hazel eye, with its frequent smile, had not a spark of geniality. After a time those about her found something scathing in its dry light.

Now, as soon as her husband became aware that she was watching him, his look wavered, and his mood collapsed. He threw her a curious furtive glance, and fell silent.

"I suppose Mr. Harden and his sister remind you of your London Socialist friends, Marcella?" asked Mrs. Boyce lightly, in the pause that followed. "You have, I see, taken a great liking for them."

"Oh! well—I don't know," said Marcella, with a shrug, and something of a proud reticence. "Mr. Harden is very kind—but—he doesn't seem to have thought much about things."

She never talked about her London friends to her mother, if she could help it. The sentiments of life generally avoided Mrs. Boyce when they could. Marcella being all sentiment and impulse, was constantly her mother's victim, do what she would. But in her quiet moments she stood on the defensive.

"So the Socialists are the only people who think?" said Mrs. Boyce, who was now standing by the window, pressing her dog's head against her dress as he pushed up against her. "Well, I am sorry for the Hardens. They tell me they give all their substance away—already—and every one says it is going to be a particularly bad winter. The living, I hear, is worth nothing. All the same, I should wish them to look more cheerful. It is the first duty of martyrs."

Marcella looked at her mother indignantly. It seemed to her often that she said the most heartless things imaginable.

"Cheerful!" she said—"in a village like this—with all the young men drifting off to London, and all the well-to-do people dissenters—no one to stand by him—no money and no helpers—the people always ill—wages eleven and twelve shillings a week—and only the old wrecks of men left to do the work! He might, I think, expect the people in this house to back him up a little. All he asks is that papa should go and satisfy himself with his own eyes as to the difference between our property and Lord Maxwell's—"

"Lord Maxwell's!" cried Mr. Boyce, rousing himself from a state of half-melancholy, half-sleepy reverie by the fire, and throwing away his cigarette—"Lord Maxwell! Difference! I should think so. Thirty thousand a year, if he has a penny. By the way, I wish he would just have the civility to answer my note about those coverts over by Willow Scrubs!"

He had hardly said the words when the door opened to admit William the footman, in his usual tremor of nervousness, carrying a salver and a note.

"The man says, please sir, is there any answer, sir?"

"Well, that's odd!" said Mr. Boyce, his look brightening. "Here is
Lord Maxwell's answer, just as I was talking of it."

His wife turned sharply and watched him take it; her lips parted, a strange expectancy in her whole attitude. He tore it open, read it, and then threw it angrily under the grate.

"No answer. Shut the door." The lad retreated. Mr. Boyce sat down and began carefully to put the fire together. His thin left hand shook upon his knee.

There was a moment's pause of complete silence. Mrs. Boyce's face might have been seen by a close observer to quiver and then stiffen as she stood in the light of the window, a tall and queenly figure in her sweeping black. But she said not a word, and presently left the room.

Marcella watched her father.

"Papa—was that a note from Lord Maxwell?"

Mr. Boyce looked round with a start, as though surprised that any one was still there. It struck Marcella that he looked yellow and shrunken—years older than her mother. An impulse of tenderness, joined with anger and a sudden sick depression—she was conscious of them all as she got up and went across to him, determined to speak out. Her parents were not her friends, and did not possess her confidence; but her constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimes the result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger might have had. She had no habitual deference to break through, and the hindering restraints of memory, though strong, were still less strong than they would have been if she had lived with them day by day and year by year, and had known their lives in close detail instead of guessing at them, as was now so often the case with her.

"Papa, is Lord Maxwell's note an uncivil one?"

Mr. Boyce stooped forward and began to rub his chilly hand over the blaze.

"Why, that man's only son and I used to loaf and shoot and play cricket together from morning till night when we were boys. Henry Raeburn was a bit older than I, and he lent me the gun with which I shot my first rabbit. It was in one of the fields over by Soleyhurst, just where the two estates join. After that we were always companions—we used to go out at night with the keepers after poachers; we spent hours in the snow watching for wood-pigeons; we shot that pair of kestrels over the inner hall door, in the Windmill Hill fields—at least I did—I was a better shot than he by that time. He didn't like Robert—he always wanted me."

"Well, papa, but what does he say?" asked Marcella, impatiently. She laid her hand, however, as she spoke, on her father's shoulder.

Mr. Boyce winced and looked up at her. He and her mother had originally sent their daughter away from home that they might avoid the daily worry of her awakening curiosities, and one of his resolutions in coming to Mellor Park had been to keep up his dignity with her. But the sight of her dark face bent upon him, softened by a quick and womanly compassion, seemed to set free a new impulse in him.

"He writes in the third person, if you want to know, my dear, and refers me to his agent, very much as though I were some London grocer who had just bought the place. Oh, it is quite evident what he means. They were here without moving all through June and July, and it is now three weeks at least since he and Miss Raeburn came back from Scotland, and not a card nor a word from either of them! Nor from the Winterbournes, nor the Levens. Pleasant! Well, my dear, you must make up your mind to it. I did think—I was fool enough to think—that when I came back to the old place, my father's old friends would let bygones be bygones. I never did them any harm. Let them 'gang their gait,' confound them!"—the little dark man straightened himself fiercely—"I can get my pleasure out of the land; and as for your mother, she'd not lift a finger to propitiate one of them!"

In the last words, however, there was not a fraction of that sympathetic pride which the ear expected, but rather fresh bitterness and grievance.

Marcella stood thinking, her mind travelling hither and thither with lightning speed, now over the social events of the last six weeks—now over incidents of those long-past holidays. Was this, indeed, the second volume beginning—the natural sequel to those old mysterious histories of shrinking, disillusion, and repulse?

"What was it you wanted about those coverts, papa?" she asked presently, with a quick decision.

"What the deuce does it matter? If you want to know, I proposed to him to exchange my coverts over by the Scrubs, which work in with his shooting, for the wood down by the Home Farm. It was an exchange made year after year in my father's time. When I spoke to the keeper, I found it had been allowed to lapse. Your uncle let the shooting go to rack and ruin after Harold's death. It gave me something to write about, and I was determined to know where I stood—Well! the old Pharisee can go his way: I'll go mine."

And with a spasmodic attempt to play the squire of Mellor on his native heath, Richard Boyce rose, drew his emaciated frame to its full height, and stood looking out drearily to his ancestral lawns—a picturesque and elegant figure, for all its weakness and pitiableness.

"I shall ask Mr. Aldous Raeburn about it, if I see him in the village to-day," said Marcella, quietly.

Her father started, and looked at her with some attention.

"What have you seen of Aldous Raeburn?" he inquired. "I remember hearing that you had come across him."

"Certainly I have come across him. I have met him once or twice at the Vicarage—and—oh! on one or two other occasions," said Marcella, carelessly. "He has always made himself agreeable. Mr. Harden says his grandfather is devoted to him, and will hardly ever let him go away from home. He does a great deal for Lord Maxwell now: writes for him, and helps to manage the estate; and next year, when the Tories come back and Lord Maxwell is in office again—"

"Why, of course, there'll be plums for the grandson," said Mr. Boyce with a sneer. "That goes without saying—though we are such a virtuous lot."

"Oh yes, he'll get on—everybody says so. And he'll deserve it too!" she added, her eye kindling combatively as she surveyed her father. "He takes a lot of trouble down here, about the cottages and the board of guardians and the farms. The Hardens like him very much, but he is not exactly popular, according to them. His manners are sometimes shy and awkward, and the poor people think he's proud."

"Ah! a prig I dare say—like some of his uncles before him," said Mr.
Boyce, irritably. "But he was civil to you, you say?"

And again he turned a quick considering eye on his daughter.

"Oh dear! yes," said Marcella, with a little proud smile. There was a pause; then she spoke again. "I must go off to the church; the Hardens have hard work just now with the harvest festival, and I promised to take them some flowers."

"Well"—said her father, grudgingly, "so long as you don't promise anything on my account! I tell you, I haven't got sixpence to spend on subscriptions to anything or anybody. By the way, if you see Reynolds anywhere about the drive, you can send him to me. He and I are going round the Home Farm to pick up a few birds if we can, and see what the coverts look like. The stock has all run down, and the place has been poached to death. But he thinks if we take on an extra man in the spring, and spend a little on rearing, we shall do pretty decently next year."

The colour leapt to Marcella's cheek as she tied on her hat.

"You will set up another keeper, and you won't do anything for the village?" she cried, her black eyes lightening, and without another word she opened the French window and walked rapidly away along the terrace, leaving her father both angered and amazed.

A man like Richard Boyce cannot get comfortably through life without a good deal of masquerading in which those in his immediate neighbourhood are expected to join. His wife had long since consented to play the game, on condition of making it plain the whole time that she was no dupe. As to what Marcella's part in the affair might be going to be, her father was as yet uneasily in the dark. What constantly astonished him, as she moved and talked under his eye, was the girl's beauty. Surely she had been a plain child, though a striking one. But now she had not only beauty, but the air of beauty. The self-confidence given by the possession of good looks was very evident in her behaviour. She was very accomplished, too, and more clever than was always quite agreeable to a father whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him by misfortune. Such a girl was sure to be admired. She would have lovers—friends of her own. It seemed that already, while Lord Maxwell was preparing to insult the father, his grandson had discovered that the daughter was handsome. Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie, wherein the Raeburns' behaviour and Marcella's unexpected gifts played about equal parts.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the "Cedar garden," the most adorable corner of Mellor Park, where the original Tudor house, grey, mullioned and ivy-covered, ran at right angles into the later "garden front," which projected beyond it to the south, making thereby a sunny and sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowers grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as though conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty. The grass indeed wanted mowing, and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it; the flowers were untied and untrimmed. But under the condition of two gardeners to ten acres of garden, nature does very much as she pleases, and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain.

As for Marcella, she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness by the ragged charm of the old place.

On the one hand, it angered her that anything so plainly meant for beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt. On the other, if house and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of the neighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply, shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,—in short, the general self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,—where would have been that thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely, which the old place so constantly made upon her? It seemed to depend even upon her, the latest born of all its children—to ask for tendance and cherishing even from her. She was always planning how—with a minimum of money to spend—it could be comforted and healed, and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as though she had been bred there.

But this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult and depression of spirit. What was this past which in these new surroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again? She energetically decided that the time had come for her to demand the truth. Yet, of whom? Marcella knew very well that to force her mother to any line of action Mrs. Boyce was unwilling to follow, was beyond her power. And it was not easy to go to her father directly and say, "Tell me exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back upon you." All the same, it was due to them all, due to herself especially, now that she was grown up and at home, that she should not be kept in the dark any longer like a baby, that she should be put in possession of the facts which, after all, threatened to stand here at Mellor Park, as untowardly in their, in her way, as they had done in the shabby school and lodging-house existence of all those bygone years.

Perhaps the secret of her impatience was that she did not, and could not, believe that the facts, if faced, would turn out to be insurmountable. Her instinct told her as she looked back that their relation toward society in the past, though full of discomforts and humiliations, had not been the relation of outcasts. Their poverty and the shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them the disrespect of one class; and as to the acquaintances and friends of their own rank, what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cool distaste for their company, an insulting readiness to forget the existence of people who had so to speak lost their social bloom, and laid themselves open to the contemptuous disapproval or pity of the world. Everybody, it seemed, knew their affairs, and knowing them saw no personal advantage and distinction in the Boyces' acquaintance, but rather the contrary.

As she put the facts together a little, she realised, however, that the breach had always been deepest between her father and his relations, or his oldest friends. A little shiver passed through her as she reflected that here, in his own country, where his history was best known, the feeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably be strongest. Well, it was hard upon them!—hard upon her mother—hard upon her. In her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and the dignities of her new position, how little she had thought of these things! And there they were all the time—dogging and thwarting.

She walked slowly along, with her burden of flowers, through a laurel path which led straight to the drive, and so, across it, to the little church. The church stood all alone there under the great limes of the Park, far away from parsonage and village—the property, it seemed, of the big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south sides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had been already at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit of necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.

It was the unpretending church of a hamlet, girt outside by the humble graves of toiling and forgotten generations, and adorned, or, at any rate, diversified within by a group of mural monuments, of various styles and dates, but all of them bearing, in some way or another, the name of Boyce—conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub-crowned tomb in the chancel, marking the remains of that Parliamentarian Boyce who fought side by side with Hampden, his boyish friend, at Chalgrove Field, lived to be driven out of Westminster by Colonel Pryde, and to spend his later years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and then with the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithful idea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a family of any very great pretensions—a race for the most part of frugal, upright country gentlemen—to be found, with scarcely an exception, on the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce's education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections—a tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but on the whole honourable English stuff—the stuff which has made, and still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.

Only once was there a break in the uniform character of the monuments—a break corresponding to the highest moment of the Boyce fortunes, a moment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly into brilliance, and the prose of generations broke into a few years of poetry. Somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard Boyce went abroad to make the grand tour. He was a man of parts, the friend of Horace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whatever doors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper classes of the leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly acquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome an Italian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her home to Mellor, where straightway the garden front was built with all its fantastic and beautiful decoration, the great avenue was planted, pictures began to invade the house, and a musical library was collected whereof the innumerable faded volumes, bearing each of them the entwined names of Richard and Marcella Boyce, had been during the last few weeks mines of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of to-day.

The Italian wife bore her lord two sons, and then in early middle life she died—much loved and passionately mourned. Her tomb bore no long-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace—for she was Italian to the last, and her husband loved her the better for it—the dates of her birth and death, and then two lines from Dante's Vita Nuova.

The portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where her music-books survived,—a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand; but the Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her own physique and her father's were to be traced to its original, as well, no doubt, as the artistic aptitudes of both—aptitudes not hitherto conspicuous in her respectable race.

In reality, however, she loved every one of them—these Jacobean and Georgian squires with their interminable epitaphs. Now, as she stood in the church, looking about her, her flowers lying beside her in a tumbled heap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitable pride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one great lifting wave. The depression of her father's repentances and trepidations fell away; she felt herself in her place, under the shelter of her forefathers, incorporated and redeemed, as it were, into their guild of honour.

There were difficulties in her path, no doubt—but she had her vantage-ground, and would use it for her own profit and that of others. She had no cause for shame; and in these days of the developed individual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice and wrong. Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last two years had brought her of her natural power over men and things. She knew perfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her age could never venture—that she had fascination, resource, brain.

Already, in these few weeks—Smiles played about her lips as she thought of that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at the Hardens'. His grandfather might write what he pleased. It did not alter the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly one of the partis most coveted, and one of the men most observed, in the neighbourhood, had taken and shown a very marked interest in Mr. Boyce's daughter—all the more marked because of the reserved manner with which it had to contend.

No! whatever happened, she would carve her path, make her own way, and her parents' too. At twenty-one, nothing looks irrevocable. A woman's charm, a woman's energy should do it all.

Ay, and something else too. She looked quickly round the church, her mind swelling with the sense of the Cravens' injustice and distrust. Never could she be more conscious than here—on this very spot—of mission, of an urging call to the service of man. In front of her was the Boyces' family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretched bench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat when it came to church. Here, for the first time, had Marcella been brought face to face with the agricultural world as it is—no stage ruralism, but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects. Men of sixty and upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had worked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of their generation, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but the workhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impassive, resigned, now showing a furtive childish amusement if a schoolboy misbehaved, or a dog strayed into church, now joining with a stolid unconsciousness in the tremendous sayings of the Psalms; women coarse, or worn, or hopeless; girls and boys and young children already blanched and emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects of insanitary cottages, bad water, and starvation food—these figures and types had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella. In London the agricultural labourer, of whom she had heard much, had been to her as a pawn in the game of discussion. Here he was in the flesh; and she was called upon to live with him, and not only to talk about him. Under circumstances of peculiar responsibility too. For it was very clear that upon the owner of Mellor depended, and had always depended, the labourer of Mellor.

Well, she had tried to live with them ever since she came—had gone in and out of their cottages in flat horror and amazement at them and their lives and their surroundings; alternately pleased and repelled by their cringing; now enjoying her position among them with the natural aristocratic instinct of women, now grinding her teeth over her father's and uncle's behaviour and the little good she saw any prospect of doing for her new subjects.

What, their friend and champion, and ultimately their redeemer too? Well, and why not? Weak women have done greater things in the world. As she stood on the chancel step, vowing herself to these great things, she was conscious of a dramatic moment—would not have been sorry, perhaps, if some admiring eye could have seen and understood her.

But there was a saving sincerity at the root of her, and her strained mood sank naturally into a girlish excitement.

"We shall see!—We shall see!" she said aloud, and was startled to hear her words quite plainly in the silent church. As she spoke she stooped to separate her flowers and see what quantities she had of each.

But while she did so a sound of distant voices made her raise herself again. She walked down the church and stood at the open south door, looking and waiting. Before her stretched a green field path leading across the park to the village. The vicar and his sister were coming along it towards the church, both flower-laden, and beside walked a tall man in a brown shooting suit, with his gun in his hand and his dog beside him.

The excitement in Marcella's eyes leapt up afresh for a moment as she saw the group, and then subsided into a luminous and steady glow. She waited quietly for them, hardly responding to the affectionate signals of the vicar's sister; but inwardly she was not quiet at all. For the tall man in the brown shooting coat was Mr. Aldous Raeburn.

CHAPTER IV.

"How kind of you!" said the rector's sister, enthusiastically; "but I thought you would come and help us."

And as Marcella took some of her burdens from her, Miss Harden kissed Marcella's cheek with a sort of timid eagerness. She had fallen in love with Miss Boyce from the beginning, was now just advanced to this privilege of kissing, and being entirely convinced that her new friend possessed all virtues and all knowledge, found it not difficult to hold that she had been divinely sent to sustain her brother and herself in the disheartening task of civilising Mellor. Mary Harden was naturally a short, roundly made girl, neither pretty nor plain, with grey-blue eyes, a shy manner, and a heart all goodness. Her brother was like unto her—also short, round, and full-faced, with the same attractive eyes. Both were singularly young in aspect—a boy and girl pair. Both had the worn, pinched look which Mrs. Boyce complained of, and which, indeed, went oddly with their whole physique. It was as though creatures built for a normal life of easy give and take with their fellows had fallen upon some unfitting and jarring experience. One striking difference, indeed, there was between them, for amid the brother's timidity and sweetness there lay, clearly to be felt and seen, the consciousness of the priest—nascent and immature, but already urging and characteristic.

Only one face of the three showed any other emotion than quick pleasure at the sight of Marcella Boyce. Aldous Raeburn was clearly embarrassed thereby. Indeed, as he laid down his gun outside the low churchyard wall, while Marcella and the Hardens were greeting, that generally self-possessed though modest person was conscious of a quite disabling perturbation of mind. Why in the name of all good manners and decency had he allowed himself to be discovered in shooting trim, on that particular morning, by Mr. Boyce's daughter on her father's land, and within a stone's throw of her father's house? Was he not perfectly well aware of the curt note which his grandfather had that morning despatched to the new owner of Mellor? Had he not ineffectually tried to delay execution the night before, thereby puzzling and half-offending his grandfather? Had not the incident weighed on him ever since, wounding an admiration and sympathy which seemed to have stolen upon him in the dark, during these few weeks since he had made Miss Boyce's acquaintance, so strong and startling did he all in a moment feel them to be?

And then to intrude upon her thus, out of nothing apparently but sheer moth-like incapacity to keep away! The church footpath indeed was public property, and Miss Harden's burdens had cried aloud to any passing male to help her. But why in this neighbourhood at all?—why not rather on the other side of the county? He could have scourged himself on the spot for an unpardonable breach of manners and feeling.

However, Miss Boyce certainly made no sign. She received him without any empressement, but also without the smallest symptom of offence. They all moved into the church together, Mr. Raeburn carrying a vast bundle of ivy and fern, the rector and his sister laden with closely-packed baskets of cut flowers. Everything was laid down on the chancel steps beside Marcella's contribution, and then the Hardens began to plan out operations. Miss Harden ran over on her fingers the contributions which had been sent in to the rectory, or were presently coming over to the church in a hand-cart. "Lord Maxwell has sent the most beautiful pots for the chancel," she said, with a grateful look at young Raeburn. "It will be quite a show." To which the young rector assented warmly. It was very good, indeed, of Lord Maxwell to remember them always so liberally at times like these, when they had so little direct claim upon him. They were not his church or his parish, but he never forgot them all the same, and Mellor was grateful. The rector had all his sister's gentle effusiveness, but a professional dignity besides, even in his thanks, which made itself felt.

Marcella flushed as he was speaking.

"I went to see what I could get in the way of greenhouse things," she said in a sudden proud voice. "But we have nothing. There are the houses, but there is nothing in them. But you shall have all our out-of-door flowers, and I think a good deal might be done with autumn leaves and wild things if you will let me try."

A speech, which brought a flush to Mr. Raeburn's cheek as he stood in the background, and led Mary Harden into an eager asking of Marcella's counsels, and an eager praising of her flowers.

Aldous Raeburn said nothing, but his discomfort increased with every moment. Why had his grandfather been so officious in this matter of the flowers? All very well when Mellor was empty, or in the days of a miser and eccentric, without womankind, like Robert Boyce. But now—the act began to seem to him offensive, a fresh affront offered to an unprotected girl, whose quivering sensitive look as she stood talking to the Hardens touched him profoundly. Mellor church might almost be regarded as the Boyces' private chapel, so bound up was it with the family and the house. He realised painfully that he ought to be gone—yet could not tear himself away. Her passionate willingness to spend herself for the place and people she had made her own at first sight, checked every now and then by a proud and sore reserve—it was too pretty, too sad. It stung and spurred him as he watched her; one moment his foot moved for departure, the next he was resolving that somehow or other he must make speech with her—excuse—explain. Ridiculous! How was it possible that he should do either!

He had met her—perhaps had tried to meet her—tolerably often since their first chance encounter weeks ago in the vicarage drawing-room. All through there had been on his side the uncomfortable knowledge of his grandfather's antipathy to Richard Boyce, and of the social steps to which that antipathy would inevitably lead. But Miss Boyce had never shown the smallest consciousness, so far, of anything untoward or unusual in her position. She had been clearly taken up with the interest and pleasure of this new spectacle upon which she had entered. The old house, its associations, its history, the beautiful country in which it lay, the speech and characteristics of rural labour as compared with that of the town,—he had heard her talk of all these things with a freshness, a human sympathy, a freedom from conventional phrase, and, no doubt, a touch of egotism and extravagance, which rivetted attention. The egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical discomfort on his part, had not in the end repelled him at all. The girl's vivid beauty glorified them; made them seem to him a mere special fulness of life. So that in his new preoccupation with herself, and by contact with her frank self-confidence, he had almost forgotten her position, and his own indirect relation to it. Then had come that unlucky note from Mellor; his grandfather's prompt reply to it; his own ineffective protest; and now this tongue-tiedness—this clumsy intrusion—which she must feel to be an indelicacy—an outrage.

Suddenly he heard Miss Harden saying, with penitent emphasis, "I am stupid! I have left the scissors and the wire on the table at home; we can't get on without them; it is really too bad of me."

"I will go for them," said Marcella promptly. "Here is the hand-cart just arrived and some people come to help; you can't be spared. I will be back directly."

And, gathering up her black skirt in a slim white hand, she sped down the church, and was out of the south door before the Hardens had time to protest, or Aldous Raeburn understood what she was doing.

A vexed word from Miss Harden enlightened him, and he went after the fugitive, overtaking her just where his gun and dog lay, outside the churchyard.

"Let me go, Miss Boyce," he said, as he caught her up. "My dog and I will run there and back."

But Marcella hardly looked at him, or paused.

"Oh no!" she said quickly, "I should like the walk."

He hesitated; then, with a flush which altered his usually quiet, self-contained expression, he moved on beside her.

"Allow me to go with you then. You are sure to find fresh loads to bring back. If it's like our harvest festival, the things keep dropping in all day."

Marcella's eyes were still on the ground.

"I thought you were on your way to shoot, Mr. Raeburn?"

"So I was, but there is no hurry; if I can be useful. Both the birds and the keeper can wait."

"Where are you going?"

"To some outlying fields of ours on the Windmill Hill. There is a tenant there who wants to see me. He is a prosy person with a host of grievances. I took my gun as a possible means of escape from him."

"Windmill Hill? I know the name. Oh! I remember: it was there—my father has just been telling me—that your father and he shot the pair of kestrels, when they were boys together."

Her tone was quite light, but somehow it had an accent, an emphasis, which made Aldous Raeburn supremely uncomfortable. In his disquiet, he thought of various things to say; but he was not ready, nor naturally effusive; the turn of them did not please him; and he remained silent.

Meantime Marcella's heart was beating fast. She was meditating a coup.

"Mr. Raeburn!"

"Yes!"

"Will you think me a very extraordinary person if I ask you a question? Your father and mine were great friends, weren't they, as boys?—your family and mine were friends, altogether?"

"I believe so—I have always heard so," said her companion, flushing still redder.

"You knew Uncle Robert—Lord Maxwell did?"

"Yes—as much as anybody knew him—but—"

"Oh, I know: he shut himself up and hated his neighbours. Still you knew him, and papa and your father were boys together. Well then, if you won't mind telling me—I know it's bold to ask, but I have reasons—why does Lord Maxwell write to papa in the third person, and why has your aunt, Miss Raeburn, never found time in all these weeks to call on mamma?"

She turned and faced him, her splendid eyes one challenge. The glow and fire of the whole gesture—the daring of it, and yet the suggestion of womanish weakness in the hand which trembled against her dress and in the twitching lip—if it had been fine acting, it could not have been more complete. And, in a sense, acting there was in it. Marcella's emotions were real, but her mind seldom deserted her. One half of her was impulsive and passionate; the other half looked on and put in finishing touches.

Acting or no, the surprise of her outburst swept the man beside her off his feet. He found himself floundering in a sea of excuses—not for his relations, but for himself. He ought never to have intruded; it was odious, unpardonable; he had no business whatever to put himself in her way! Would she please understand that it was an accident? It should not happen again. He quite understood that she could not regard him with friendliness. And so on. He had never so lost his self-possession.

Meanwhile Marcella's brows contracted. She took his excuses as a fresh offence.

"You mean, I suppose, that I have no right to ask such questions!" she cried; "that I am not behaving like a lady—as one of your relations would? Well, I dare say! I was not brought up like that. I was not brought up at all; I have had to make myself. So you must avoid me if you like. Of course you will. But I resolved there—in the church—that I would make just one effort, before everything crystallises, to break through. If we must live on here hating our neighbours and being cut by them, I thought I would just ask you why, first. There is no one else to ask. Hardly anybody has called, except the Hardens, and a few new people that don't matter. And I have nothing to be ashamed of," said the girl passionately, "nor has mamma. Papa, I suppose, did some bad things long ago. I have never known—I don't know now—what they were. But I should like to understand. Is everybody going to cut us because of that?"

With a great effort Aldous Raeburn pulled himself together, certain fine instincts both of race and conduct coming to his help. He met her excited look by one which had both dignity and friendliness.

"I will tell you what I can, Miss Boyce. If you ask me, it is right I should. You must forgive me if I say anything that hurts you. I will try not—I will try not!" he repeated earnestly. "In the first place, I know hardly anything in detail. I do not remember that I have ever wished to know. But I gather that some years ago—when I was still a lad—something in Mr. Boyce's life—some financial matters, I believe—during the time that he was member of Parliament, made a scandal, and especially among his family and old friends. It was the effect upon his old father, I think, who, as you know, died soon afterwards—"

Marcella started.

"I didn't know," she said quickly.

Aldous Raeburn's distress grew.

"I really oughtn't to speak of these things," he said, "for I don't know them accurately. But I want to answer what you said—I do indeed. It was that, I think, chiefly. Everybody here respected and loved your grandfather—my grandfather did—and there was great feeling for him—"

"I see! I see!" said Marcella, her chest heaving; "and against papa."

She walked on quickly, hardly seeing where she was going, her eyes dim with tears. There was a wretched pause. Then Aldous Raeburn broke out—

"But after all it is very long ago. And there may have been some harsh judgment. My grandfather may have been misinformed as to some of the facts. And I—"

He hesitated, struck with the awkwardness of what he was going to say.
But Marcella understood him.

"And you will try and make him alter his mind?" she said, not ungratefully, but still with a touch of sarcasm in her tone. "No, Mr. Raeburn, I don't think that will succeed."

They walked on in silence for a little while. At last he said, turning upon her a face in which she could not but see the true feeling of a just and kindly man—

"I meant that if my grandfather could be led to express himself in a way which Mr. Boyce could accept, even if there were no great friendship as there used to be, there might be something better than this—this, which—which—is so painful. And any way, Miss Boyce, whatever happens, will you let me say this once, that there is no word, no feeling in this neighbourhood—how could there be?—towards you and your mother, but one of respect and admiration? Do believe that, even if you feel that you can never be friendly towards me and mine again—or forget the things I have said!"

"Respect and admiration!" said Marcella, wondering, and still scornful. "Pity, perhaps. There might be that. But any way mamma goes with papa. She always has done. She always will. So shall I, of course. But I am sorry—horribly sore and sorry! I was so delighted to come here. I have been very little at home, and understood hardly anything about this worry—not how serious it was, nor what it meant. Oh! I am sorry—there was so much I wanted to do here—if anybody could only understand what it means to me to come to this place!"

They had reached the brow of a little rising ground. Just below them, beyond a stubble field in which there were a few bent forms of gleaners, lay the small scattered Tillage, hardly seen amid its trees, the curls of its blue smoke ascending steadily on this calm September morning against a great belt of distant beechwood which begirt the hamlet and the common along which it lay. The stubble field was a feast of shade and tint, of apricots and golds shot with the subtlest purples and browns; the flame of the wild-cherry leaf and the deeper crimson of the haws made every hedge a wonder; the apples gleamed in the cottage garden; and a cloudless sun poured down on field and hedge, and on the half-hidden medley of tiled roofs, sharp gables, and jutting dormers which made the village.

Instinctively both stopped. Marcella locked her hands behind her in a gesture familiar to her in moments of excitement; the light wind blew back her dress in soft, eddying folds; for the moment, in her tall grace, she had the air of some young Victory poised upon a height, till you looked at her face, which was, indeed, not exultant at all, but tragic, extravagantly tragic, as Aldous Raeburn, in his English reserve, would perhaps have thought in the case of any woman with tamer eyes and a less winning mouth.

"I don't want to talk about myself," she began. "But you know, Mr. Raeburn—you must know—what a state of things there is here—you know what a disgrace that village is. Oh! one reads books, but I never thought people could actually live like that—here in the wide country, with room for all. It makes me lie awake at night. We are not rich—we are very poor—the house is all out of repair, and the estate, as of course you know, is in a wretched condition. But when I see these cottages, and the water, and the children, I ask what right we have to anything we get. I had some friends in London who were Socialists, and I followed and agreed with them, but here one sees! Yes, indeed!—it is too great a risk to let the individual alone when all these lives depend upon him. Uncle Robert was an eccentric and a miser; and look at the death-rate of the village—look at the children; you can see how it has crushed the Hardens already. No, we have no right to it!—it ought to be taken from us; some day it will be taken from us!"

Aldous Raeburn smiled, and was himself again. A woman's speculations were easier to deal with than a woman's distress.

"It is not so hopeless as that, I think," he said kindly. "The Mellor cottages are in a bad state certainly. But you have no idea how soon a little energy and money and thought sets things to rights."

"But we have no money!" cried Marcella. "And if he is miserable here, my father will have no energy to do anything. He will not care what happens. He will defy everybody, and just spend what he has on himself. And it will make me wretched—wretched. Look at that cottage to the right, Mr. Raeburn. It is Jim Hurd's—a man who works mainly on the Church Farm, when he is in work. But he is deformed, and not so strong as others. The farmers too seem to be cutting down labour everywhere—of course I don't understand—I am so new to it. Hurd and his family had an awful winter, last winter—hardly kept body and soul together. And now he is out of work already—the man at the Church Farm turned him off directly after harvest. He sees no prospect of getting work by the winter. He spends his days tramping to look for it; but nothing turns up. Last winter they parted with all they could sell. This winter it must be the workhouse! It's heart-breaking. And he has a mind; he can feel! I lend him the Labour paper I take in, and get him to talk. He has more education than most, and oh! the bitterness at the bottom of him. But not against persons—individuals. It is like a sort of blind patience when you come to that—they make excuses even for Uncle Robert, to whom they have paid rent all these years for a cottage which is a crime—yes, a crime! The woman must have been such a pretty creature—and refined too. She is consumptive, of course—what else could you expect with that cottage and that food? So is the eldest boy—a little white atomy! And the other children. Talk of London—I never saw such sickly objects as there are in this village. Twelve shillings a week, and work about half the year! Oh! they ought to hate us!—I try to make them," cried Marcella, her eyes gleaming. "They ought to hate all of us landowners, and the whole wicked system. It keeps them from the land which they ought to be sharing with us; it makes one man master, instead of all men brothers. And who is fit to be master? Which of us? Everybody is so ready to take the charge of other people's lives, and then look at the result!"

"Well, the result, even in rural England, is not always so bad," said Aldous Raeburn, smiling a little, but more coldly. Marcella, glancing at him, understood in a moment that she had roused a certain family and class pride in him—a pride which was not going to assert itself, but none the less implied the sudden opening of a gulf between herself and him. In an instant her quick imagination realised herself as the daughter and niece of two discredited members of a great class. When she attacked the class, or the system, the man beside her—any man in similar circumstances—must naturally think: "Ah, well, poor girl—Dick Boyce's daughter—what can you expect?" Whereas—Aldous Raeburn!—she thought of the dignity of the Maxwell name, of the width of the Maxwell possessions, balanced only by the high reputation of the family for honourable, just and Christian living, whether as amongst themselves or towards their neighbours and dependents. A shiver of passionate vanity, wrath, and longing passed through her as her tall frame stiffened.

"There are model squires, of course," she said slowly, striving at least for a personal dignity which should match his. "There are plenty of landowners who do their duty as they understand it—no one denies that. But that does not affect the system; the grandson of the best man may be the worst, but his one-man power remains the same. No! the time has come for a wider basis. Paternal government and charity were very well in their way—democratic self-government will manage to do without them!"

She flung him a gay, quivering, defiant look. It delighted her to pit these wide and threatening generalisations against the Maxwell power—to show the heir of it that she at least—father or no father—was no hereditary subject of his, and bound to no blind admiration of the Maxwell methods and position.

Aldous Raeburn took her onslaught very calmly, smiling frankly back at her indeed all the time. Miss Boyce's opinions could hardly matter to him intellectually, whatever charm and stimulus he might find in her talk. This subject of the duties, rights, and prospects of his class went, as it happened, very deep with him—too deep for chance discussion. What she said, if he ever stopped to think of it in itself, seemed to him a compound of elements derived partly from her personal history, partly from the random opinions that young people of a generous type pick up from newspapers and magazines. She had touched his family pride for an instant; but only for an instant. What he was abidingly conscious of, was of a beautiful wild creature struggling with difficulties in which he was somehow himself concerned, and out of which, in some way or other, he was becoming more and more determined—absurdly determined—to help her.

"Oh! no doubt the world will do very well without us some day," he said lightly, in answer to her tirade; "no one is indispensable. But are you so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed? I thought I had observed—pardon me for saying it—on the two or three occasions we have met, some degenerate signs of individualism? You take pleasure in the old place, you say; you were delighted to come and live where your ancestors lived before you; you are full of desires to pull these poor people out of the mire in your own way. No! I don't feel that you are thorough-going!"

Marcella paused a frowning moment, then broke suddenly into a delightful laugh—a laugh of humorous confession, which changed her whole look and mood.

"Is that all you have noticed? If you wish to know, Mr. Raeburn, I love the labourers for touching their hats to me. I love the school children for bobbing to me. I love my very self—ridiculous as you may think it—for being Miss Boyce of Mellor!"

"Don't say things like that, please!" he interrupted; "I think I have not deserved them."

His tone made her repent her gibe. "No, indeed, you have been most kind to me," she cried. "I don't know how it is. I am bitter and personal in a moment—when I don't mean to be. Yes! you are quite right. I am proud of it all. If nobody comes to see us, and we are left all alone out in the cold, I shall still have room enough to be proud in—proud of the old house and our few bits of pictures, and the family papers, and the beeches! How absurd it would seem to other people, who have so much more! But I have had so little—so little!" Her voice had a hungry lingering note. "And as for the people, yes, I am proud too that they like me, and that already I can influence them. Oh, I will do my best for them, my very best! But it will be hard, very hard, if there is no one to help me!"

She heaved a long sigh. In spite of the words, what she had said did not seem to be an appeal for his pity. Rather there was in it a sweet self-dedicating note as of one going sadly alone to a painful task, a note which once more left Aldous Raeburn's self-restraint tottering. She was walking gently beside him, her pretty dress trailing lightly over the dry stubble, her hand in its white ruffles hanging so close beside him—after all her prophetess airs a pensive womanly thing, that must surely hear how his strong man's heart was beginning to beat!

He bent over to her.

"Don't talk of there being no one to help! There may be many ways out of present difficulties. Meanwhile, however things go, could you be large-minded enough to count one person here your friend?"

She looked up at him. Tall as she was, he was taller—she liked that; she liked too the quiet cautious strength of his English expression and bearing. She did not think him handsome, and she was conscious of no thrill. But inwardly her quick dramatising imagination was already constructing her own future and his. The ambition to rule leapt in her, and the delight in conquest. It was with a delicious sense of her own power, and of the general fulness of her new life, that she said, "I am large-minded enough! You have been very kind, and I have been very wild and indiscreet. But I don't regret: I am sure, if you can help me, you will."

There was a little pause. They were standing at the last gate before the miry village road began, and almost in sight of the little vicarage. Aldous Raeburn, with his hand on the gate, suddenly gathered a spray of travellers'-joy out of the hedge beside him.

"That was a promise, I think, and I keep the pledge of it," he said, and with a smile put the cluster of white seed-tufts and green leaves into one of the pockets of his shooting jacket.

"Oh, don't tie me down!" said Marcella, laughing, but flushing also. "And don't you think, Mr. Raeburn, that you might open that gate? At least, we can't get the scissors and the wire unless you do."

CHAPTER V.

The autumn evening was far advanced when Aldous Raeburn, after his day's shooting, passed again by the gates of Mellor Park on his road home. He glanced up the ill-kept drive, with its fine overhanging limes, caught a glimpse to the left of the little church, and to the right, of the long eastern front of the house; lingered a moment to watch the sunset light streaming through the level branches of two distant cedars, standing black and sharp against the fiery west, and then walked briskly forwards in the mood of a man going as fast as may be to an appointment he both desires and dreads.

He had given his gun to the keeper, who had already sped far ahead of him, in the shooting-cart which his master had declined. His dog, a black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat weary and stiff with exercise. But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous Raeburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two miles of extra walking which now lay between him and Maxwell Court.

About him, as he trudged on, lay a beautiful world of English woodland. After he had passed through the hamlet of Mellor, with its three-cornered piece of open common, and its patches of arable—representing the original forest-clearing made centuries ago by the primitive fathers of the village in this corner of the Chiltern uplands—the beech woods closed thickly round him. Beech woods of all kinds—from forest slopes, where majestic trees, grey and soaring pillars of the woodland roof, stood in stately isolation on the dead-leaf carpet woven by the years about their carved and polished bases, to the close plantations of young trees, where the saplings crowded on each other, and here and there amid the airless tangle of leaf and branch some long pheasant-drive, cut straight through the green heart of the wood, refreshed the seeking eye with its arched and far-receding path. Two or three times on his walk Aldous heard from far within the trees the sounds of hatchet and turner's wheel, which told him he was passing one of the wood-cutter's huts that in the hilly parts of this district supply the first simple steps of the chairmaking industry, carried on in the little factory towns of the more populous valleys. And two or three times also he passed a string of the great timber carts which haunt the Chiltern lanes; the patient team of brown horses straining at the weight behind them, the vast prostrate trunks rattling in their chains, and the smoke from the carters' pipes rising slowly into the damp sunset air. But for the most part the road along which he walked was utterly forsaken of human kind. Nor were there any signs of habitation—no cottages, no farms. He was scarcely more than thirty miles from London; yet in this solemn evening glow it would have been hardly possible to find a remoter, lonelier nature than that through which he was passing.

And presently the solitude took a grander note. He was nearing the edge of the high upland along which he had been walking. In front of him the long road with its gleaming pools bent sharply to the left, showing pale and distinct against a darkening heaven and the wide grey fields which had now, on one side of his path, replaced the serried growth of young plantations. Night was fast advancing from south and east over the upland. But straight in front of him and on his right, the forest trees, still flooded with sunset, fell in sharp steeps towards the plain. Through their straight stems glowed the blues and purples of that lower world; and when the slopes broke and opened here and there, above the rounded masses of their red and golden leaf the level distances of the plain could be seen stretching away, illimitable in the evening dusk, to a west of glory, just vacant of the sun. The golden ball had sunk into the mists awaiting it, but the splendour of its last rays was still on all the western front of the hills, bathing the beech woods as they rose and fell with the large undulations of the ground.

Insensibly Raeburn, filled as he was with a new and surging emotion, drew the solemnity of the forest glades and of the rolling distances into his heart. When he reached the point where the road diverged to the left, he mounted a little grassy ridge, whence he commanded the whole sweep of the hill rampart from north to west, and the whole expanse of the low country beneath, and there stood gazing for some minutes, lost in many thoughts, while the night fell.

He looked over the central plain of England—the plain which stretches westward to the Thames and the Berkshire hills, and northward through the Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire lowlands to the basin of the Trent. An historic plain—symbolic, all of it, to an English eye. There in the western distance, amid the light-filled mists, lay Oxford; in front of him was the site of Chalgrove Field, where Hampden got his clumsy death wound, and Thame, where he died; and far away, to his right, where the hills swept to the north, he could just discern, gleaming against the face of the down, the vast scoured cross, whereby a Saxon king had blazoned his victory over his Danish foes to all the plain beneath.

Aldous Raeburn was a man to feel these things. He had seldom stood on this high point, in such an evening calm, without the expansion in him of all that was most manly, most English, most strenuous. If it had not been so, indeed, he must have been singularly dull of soul. For the great view had an interest for him personally it could hardly have possessed to the same degree for any other man. On his left hand Maxwell Court rose among its woods on the brow of the hill—a splendid pile which some day would be his. Behind him; through all the upland he had just traversed; beneath the point where he stood; along the sides of the hills, and far into the plain, stretched the land which also would be his—which, indeed, practically was already his—for his grandfather was an old man with a boundless trust in the heir on whom, his affections and hopes were centred. The dim churches scattered over the immediate plain below; the villages clustered round them, where dwelt the toilers in these endless fields; the farms amid their trees; the cottages showing here and there on the fringes of the wood—all the equipment and organisation of popular life over an appreciable part of the English midland at his feet, depended to an extent hardly to be exaggerated, under the conditions of the England of to-day, upon him—upon his one man's brain and conscience, the degree of his mental and moral capacity.

In his first youth, of course, the thought had often roused a boy's tremulous elation and sense of romance. Since his Cambridge days, and of late years, any more acute or dramatic perception than usual of his lot in life had been wont to bring with it rather a consciousness of weight than of inspiration. Sensitive, fastidious, reflective, he was disturbed by remorses and scruples which had never plagued his forefathers. During his college days, the special circumstances of a great friendship had drawn him into the full tide of a social speculation which, as it happened, was destined to go deeper with him than with most men. The responsibilities of the rich, the disadvantages of the poor, the relation of the State to the individual—of the old Radical dogma of free contract to the thwarting facts of social inequality; the Tory ideal of paternal government by the few as compared with the Liberal ideal of self-government by the many: these commonplaces of economical and political discussion had very early become living and often sore realities in Aldous Raeburn's mind, because of the long conflict in him, dating from his Cambridge life, between the influences of birth and early education and the influences of an admiring and profound affection which had opened to him the gates of a new moral world.

Towards the close of his first year at Trinity, & young man joined the college who rapidly became, in spite of various practical disadvantages, a leader among the best and keenest of his fellows. He was poor and held a small scholarship; but it was soon plain that his health was not equal to the Tripos routine, and that the prizes of the place, brilliant as was his intellectual endowment, were not for him. After an inward struggle, of which none perhaps but Aldous Raeburn had any exact knowledge, he laid aside his first ambitions and turned himself to another career. A couple of hours' serious brainwork in the day was all that was ever possible to him henceforward. He spent it, as well as the thoughts and conversation of his less strenuous moments, on the study of history and sociology, with a view to joining the staff of lecturers for the manufacturing and country towns which the two great Universities, touched by new and popular sympathies, were then beginning to organise. He came of a stock which promised well for such a pioneer's task. His father had been an able factory inspector, well-known for his share in the inauguration and revision of certain important factory reforms; the son inherited a passionate humanity of soul; and added to it a magnetic and personal charm which soon made him a remarkable power, not only in his own college, but among the finer spirits of the University generally. He had the gift which enables a man, sitting perhaps after dinner in a mixed society of his college contemporaries, to lead the way imperceptibly from the casual subjects of the hour—the river, the dons, the schools—to arguments "of great pith and moment," discussions that search the moral and intellectual powers of the men concerned to the utmost, without exciting distrust or any but an argumentative opposition, Edward Hallin could do this without a pose, without a false note, nay, rather by the natural force of a boyish intensity and simplicity. To many a Trinity man in after life the memory of his slight figure and fair head, of the eager slightly parted mouth, of the eyes glowing with some inward vision, and of the gesture with which he would spring up at some critical point to deliver himself, standing amid his seated and often dissentient auditors, came back vivid and ineffaceable as only youth can make the image of its prophets.

Upon Aldous Raeburn, Edward Hallin produced from the first a deep impression. The interests to which Hallin's mind soon became exclusively devoted—such as the systematic study of English poverty, or of the relation of religion to social life, reforms of the land and of the Church—overflowed upon Raeburn with a kindling and disturbing force. Edward Hallin was his gad-fly; and he had no resource, because he loved his tormentor.

Fundamentally, the two men were widely different. Raeburn was a true son of his fathers, possessed by natural inheritance of the finer instincts of aristocratic rule, including a deep contempt for mob-reason and all the vulgarities of popular rhetoric; steeped, too, in a number of subtle prejudices, and in a silent but intense pride of family of the nobler sort. He followed with disquiet and distrust the quick motions and conclusions of Hallin's intellect. Temperament and the Cambridge discipline made him a fastidious thinker and a fine scholar; his mind worked slowly, yet with a delicate precision; and his generally cold manner was the natural protection of feelings which had never yet, except in the case of his friendship with Edward Hallin, led him to much personal happiness.

Hallin left Cambridge after a pass degree to become lecturer on industrial and economical questions in the northern English towns. Raeburn stayed on a year longer, found himself third classic and the winner of a Greek verse prize, and then, sacrificing the idea of a fellowship, returned to Maxwell Court to be his grandfather's companion and helper in the work of the estate, his family proposing that, after a few years' practical experience of the life and occupations of a country gentleman, he should enter Parliament and make a career in politics. Since then five or six years had passed, during which he had learned to know the estate thoroughly, and to take his normal share in the business and pleasures of the neighbourhood. For the last two years he had been his grandfather's sole agent, a poor-law guardian and magistrate besides, and a member of most of the various committees for social and educational purposes in the county. He was a sufficiently keen sportsman to save appearances with his class; enjoyed a walk after the partridges indeed, with a friend or two, as much as most men; and played the host at the two or three great battues of the year with a propriety which his grandfather however no longer mistook for enthusiasm. There was nothing much to distinguish him from any other able man of his rank. His neighbours felt him to be a personality, but thought him reserved and difficult; he was respected, but he was not popular like his grandfather; people speculated as to how he would get on in Parliament, or whom he was to marry; but, except to the dwellers in Maxwell Court itself, or of late to the farmers and labourers on the estate, it would not have mattered much to anybody if he had not been there. Nobody ever connected any romantic thought with him. There was something in his strong build, pale but healthy aquiline face, his inconspicuous brown eyes and hair, which seemed from the beginning to mark him out as the ordinary earthy dweller in an earthy world.

Nevertheless, these years had been to Aldous Raeburn years marked by an expansion and deepening of the whole man, such as few are capable of. Edward Hallin's visits to the Court, the walking tours which brought the two friends together almost every year in Switzerland or the Highlands, the course of a full and intimate correspondence, and the various calls made for public purposes by the enthusiast and pioneer upon the pocket and social power of the rich man—these things and influences, together, of course, with the pressure of an environing world, ever more real, and, on the whole, ever more oppressive, as it was better understood, had confronted Aldous Raeburn before now with a good many teasing problems of conduct and experience. His tastes, his sympathies, his affinities were all with the old order; but the old faiths—economical, social, religious—were fermenting within him in different stages of disintegration and reconstruction; and his reserved habit and often solitary life tended to scrupulosity and over-refinement. His future career as a landowner and politician was by no means clear to him. One thing only was clear to him—that to dogmatise about any subject under heaven, at the present day, more than the immediate practical occasion absolutely demanded, was the act of an idiot.

So that Aldous Raeburn's moments of reflection had been constantly mixed with struggle of different kinds. And the particular point of view where he stood on this September evening had been often associated in his memory with flashes of self-realisation which were, on the whole, more of a torment to him than a joy. If he had not been Aldous Raeburn, or any other person, tied to a particular individuality, with a particular place and label in the world, the task of the analytic mind, in face of the spectacle of what is, would have been a more possible one!—so it had often seemed to him.

But to-night all this cumbering consciousness, all these self-made doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away! A transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot—a man once more young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at last through all his being the ecstasy of a self-surrender, long missed, long hungered for.

Six weeks was it since he had first seen her—this tall, straight, Marcella Boyce? He shut his eyes impatiently against the disturbing golds and purples of the sunset, and tried to see her again as she had walked beside him across the church fields, in that thin black dress, with, the shadow of the hat across her brow and eyes—the small white teeth flashing as she talked and smiled, the hand so ready with its gesture, so restless, so alive! What a presence—how absorbing, troubling, preoccupying! No one in her company could forget her—nay, could fail to observe her. What ease and daring, and yet no hardness with it—rather deep on deep of womanly weakness, softness, passion, beneath it all!

How straight she had flung her questions at him!—her most awkward embarrassing questions. What other woman would have dared such candour—unless perhaps as a stroke of fine art—he had known women indeed who could have done it so. But where could be the art, the policy, he asked himself indignantly, in the sudden outburst of a young girl pleading with her companion's sense of truth and good feeling in behalf of those nearest to her?

As to her dilemma itself, in his excitement he thought of it with nothing but the purest pleasure! She had let him see that she did not expect him to be able to do much for her, though she was ready to believe him her friend. Ah well—he drew a long breath. For once, Raeburn, strange compound that he was of the man of rank and the philosopher, remembered his own social power and position with an exultant satisfaction. No doubt Dick Boyce had misbehaved himself badly—the strength of Lord Maxwell's feeling was sufficient proof thereof. No doubt the "county," as Raeburn himself knew, in some detail, were disposed to leave Mellor Park severely alone. What of that? Was it for nothing that the Maxwells had been for generations at the head of the "county," i.e. of that circle of neighbouring families connected by the ties of ancestral friendship, or of intermarriage, on whom in this purely agricultural and rural district the social pleasure and comfort of Miss Boyce and her mother must depend?

He, like Marcella, did not believe that Richard Boyce's offences were of the quite unpardonable order; although, owing to a certain absent and preoccupied temper, he had never yet taken the trouble to enquire into them in detail. As to any real restoration of cordiality between the owner of Mellor and his father's old friends and connections, that of course was not to be looked for; but there should be decent social recognition, and—in the case of Mrs. Boyce and her daughter—there should be homage and warm welcome, simply because she wished it, and it was absurd she should not have it! Raeburn, whose mind was ordinarily destitute of the most elementary capacity for social intrigue, began to plot in detail how it should be done. He relied first upon winning his grandfather—his popular distinguished grandfather, whose lightest word had weight in Brookshire. And then, he himself had two or three women friends in the county—not more, for women had not occupied much place in his thoughts till now. But they were good friends, and, from the social point of view, important. He would set them to work at once. These things should be chiefly managed by women.

But no patronage! She would never bear that, the glancing proud creature. She must guess, indeed, let him tread as delicately as he might, that he and others were at work for her. But oh! she should be softly handled; as far as he could achieve it, she should, in a very little while, live and breathe compassed with warm airs of good-will and consideration.

He felt himself happy, amazingly happy, that at the very beginning of his love, it should thus be open to him, in these trivial, foolish ways, to please and befriend her. Her social dilemma and discomfort one moment, indeed, made him sore for her; the next, they were a kind of joy, since it was they gave him this opportunity to put out a strong right arm.

Everything about her at this moment was divine and lovely to him; all the qualities of her rich uneven youth which she had shown in their short intercourse—her rashness, her impulsiveness, her generosity. Let her but trust herself to him, and she should try her social experiments as she pleased—she should plan Utopias, and he would be her hodman to build them. The man perplexed with too much thinking remembered the girl's innocent, ignorant readiness to stamp the world's stuff anew after the forms of her own pitying thought, with a positive thirst of sympathy. The deep poetry and ideality at the root of him under all the weight of intellectual and critical debate leapt towards her. He thought of the rapid talk she had poured out upon him, after their compact of friendship, in their walk back to the church, of her enthusiasm for her Socialist friends and their ideals,—with a momentary madness of self-suppression and tender humility. In reality, a man like Aldous Raeburn is born to be the judge and touchstone of natures like Marcella Boyce. But the illusion of passion may deal as disturbingly with moral rank as with social.

It was his first love. Years before, in the vacation before he went to college, his boyish mind had been crossed, by a fancy for a pretty cousin a little older than himself, who had been very kind indeed to Lord Maxwell's heir. But then came Cambridge, the flow of a new mental life, his friendship for Edward Hallin, and the beginnings of a moral storm and stress. When he and the cousin next met, he was quite cold to her. She seemed to him a pretty piece of millinery, endowed with a trick of parrot phrases. She, on her part, thought him detestable; she married shortly afterwards, and often spoke to her husband in private of her "escape" from that queer fellow Aldous Raeburn.

Since then he had known plenty of pretty and charming women, both in London and in the country, and had made friends with some of them in his quiet serious way. But none of them had roused in him even a passing thrill of passion. He had despised himself for it; had told himself again and again that he was but half a man—

Ah! he had done himself injustice—he had done himself injustice!

His heart was light as air. When at last the sound of a clock striking in the plain roused him with a start, and he sprang up from the heap of stones where he had been sitting in the dusk, he bent down a moment to give a gay caress to his dog, and then trudged off briskly home, whistling under the emerging stars.

CHAPTER VI.

By the time, however, that Aldous Raeburn came within sight of the windows of Maxwell Court his first exaltation had sobered down. The lover had fallen, for the time, into the background, and the capable, serious man of thirty, with a considerable experience of the world behind him, was perfectly conscious that there were many difficulties in his path. He could not induce his grandfather to move in the matter of Richard Boyce without a statement of his own feelings and aims. Nor would he have avoided frankness if he could. On every ground it was his grandfather's due. The Raeburns were reserved towards the rest of the world, but amongst themselves there had always been a fine tradition of mutual trust; and Lord Maxwell amply deserved that at this particular moment his grandson should maintain it.

But Raeburn could not and did not flatter himself that his grandfather would, to begin with, receive his news even with toleration. The grim satisfaction with which that note about the shooting had been despatched, was very clear in the grandson's memory. At the same time it said much for the history of those long years during which the old man and his heir had been left to console each other for the terrible bereavements which had thrown them together, that Aldous Raeburn never for an instant feared the kind of violent outburst and opposition that other men in similar circumstances might have looked forward to. The just living of a life-time makes a man incapable of any mere selfish handling of another's interests—a fact on which the bystander may reckon.

It was quite dark by the time he entered the large open-roofed hall of the Court.

"Is his lordship in?" he asked of a passing footman.

"Yes, sir—in the library. He has been asking for you, sir."

Aldous turned to the right along the fine corridor lighted with Tudor windows to an inner quadrangle, and filled with Graeco-Roman statuary and sarcophagi, which made one of the principal features of the Court. The great house was warm and scented, and the various open doors which he passed on his way to the library disclosed large fire-lit rooms, with panelling, tapestry, pictures, books everywhere. The colour of the whole was dim and rich; antiquity, refinement reigned, together with an exquisite quiet and order. No one was to be seen, and not a voice was to be heard; but there was no impression of solitude. These warm, darkly-glowing rooms seemed to be waiting for the return of guests just gone out of them; not one of them but had an air of cheerful company. For once, as he walked through it, Aldous Raeburn spared the old house an affectionate possessive thought. Its size and wealth, with all that both implied, had often weighed upon him. To-night his breath quickened as he passed the range of family portraits leading to the library door. There was a vacant space here and there—"room for your missus, too, my boy, when you get her!" as his grandfather had once put it.

"Why, you've had a long day, Aldous, all by yourself," said Lord Maxwell, turning sharply round at the sound of the opening door. "What's kept you so late?"

His spectacles fell forward as he spoke, and the old man shut them in his hand, peering at his grandson through the shadows of the room. He was sitting by a huge fire, an "Edinburgh Review" open on his knee. Lamp and fire-light showed a finely-carried head, with a high wave of snowy hair thrown back, a long face delicately sharp in the lines, and an attitude instinct with the alertness of an unimpaired bodily vigour.

"The birds were scarce, and we followed them a good way," said Aldous, as he came up to the fire. "Rickman kept me on the farm, too, a good while, with interminable screeds about the things he wants done for him."

"Oh, there is no end to Rickman," said Lord Maxwell, good-humouredly. "He pays his rent for the amusement of getting it back again. Landowning will soon be the most disinterested form of philanthropy known to mankind. But I have some news for you! Here is a letter from Barton by the second post"—he named an old friend of his own, and a Cabinet Minister of the day. "Look at it. You will see he says they can't possibly carry on beyond January. Half their men are becoming unmanageable, and S——'s bill, to which they are committed, will certainly dish them. Parliament will meet in January, and he thinks an amendment to the Address will finish it. All this confidential, of course; but he saw no harm in letting me know. So now, my boy, you will have your work cut out for you this winter! Two or three evenings a week—you'll not get off with less. Nobody's plum drops into his mouth nowadays. Barton tells me, too, that he hears young Wharton will certainly stand for the Durnford division, and will be down upon us directly. He will make himself as disagreeable to us and the Levens as he can—that we may be sure of. We may be thankful for one small mercy, that his mother has departed this life! otherwise you and I would have known furens quid femina posset!"

The old man looked up at his grandson with a humorous eye. Aldous was standing absently before the fire, and did not reply immediately.

"Come, come, Aldous!" said Lord Maxwell with a touch of impatience, "don't overdo the philosopher. Though I am getting old, the next Government can't deny me a finger in the pie. You and I between us will be able to pull through two or three of the things we care about in the next House, with ordinary luck. It is my firm belief that the next election will give our side the best chance we have had for half a generation. Throw up your cap, sir! The world may be made of green cheese, but we have got to live in it!"

Aldous smiled suddenly—uncontrollably—with a look which left his grandfather staring. He had been appealing to the man of maturity standing on the threshold of a possibly considerable career, and, as he did so, it was as though he saw the boy of eighteen reappear!

"Je ne demands pas mieux!" said Aldous with a quick lift of the voice above its ordinary key. "The fact is, grandfather, I have come home with something in my mind very different from politics—and you must give me time to change the focus. I did not come home as straight as I might—for I wanted to be sure of myself before I spoke to you. During the last few weeks—"

"Go on!" cried Lord Maxwell.

But Aldous did not find it easy to go on. It suddenly struck him that it was after all absurd that he should be confiding in any one at such a stage, and his tongue stumbled.

But he had gone too far for retreat. Lord Maxwell sprang up and seized him by the arms.

"You are in love, sir! Out with it!"

"I have seen the only woman in the world I have ever wished to marry," said Aldous, flushing, but with deliberation. "Whether she will ever have me, I have no idea. But I can conceive no greater happiness than to win her. And as I want you, grandfather, to do something for her and for me, it seemed to me I had no right to keep my feelings to myself. Besides, I am not accustomed to—to—" His voice wavered a little. "You have treated me as more than a son!"

Lord Maxwell pressed his arm affectionately.

"My dear boy! But don't keep me on tenterhooks like this—tell me the name!—the name!"

And two or three long meditated possibilities flashed through the old man's mind.

Aldous replied with a certain slow stiffness—

"Marcella Boyce!—Richard Boyce's daughter. I saw her first six weeks ago."

"God bless my soul!" exclaimed Lord Maxwell, falling back a step or two, and staring at his companion. Aldous watched him with anxiety.

"You know that fellow's history, Aldous?"

"Richard Boyce? Not in detail. If you will tell me now all you know, it will be a help. Of course, I see that you and the neighbourhood mean to cut him,—and—for the sake of—of Miss Boyce and her mother, I should be glad to find a way out."

"Good heavens!" said Lord Maxwell, beginning to pace the room, hands pressed behind him, head bent. "Good heavens! what a business! what an extraordinary business!"

He stopped short in front of Aldous. "Where have you been meeting her—this young lady?"

"At the Hardens'—sometimes in Mellor village. She goes about among the cottages a great deal."

"You have not proposed to her?"

"I was not certain of myself till to-day. Besides it would have been presumption so far. She has shown me nothing but the merest friendliness."

"What, you can suppose she would refuse you!" cried Lord Maxwell, and could not for the life of him keep the sarcastic intonation out of his voice.

Aldous's look showed distress. "You have not seen her, grandfather," he said quietly.

Lord Maxwell began to pace again, trying to restrain the painful emotion that filled him. Of course, Aldous had been entrapped; the girl had played upon his pity, his chivalry—for obvious reasons.

Aldous tried to soothe him, to explain, but Lord Maxwell hardly listened. At last he threw himself into his chair again with a long breath.

"Give me time, Aldous—give me time. The thought of marrying my heir to that man's daughter knocks me over a little."

There was silence again. Then Lord Maxwell looked at his watch with old-fashioned precision.

"There is half an hour before dinner. Sit down, and let us talk this thing out."

* * * * *

The conversation thus started, however, was only begun by dinner-time; was resumed after Miss Raeburn—the small, shrewd, bright-eyed person who governed Lord Maxwell's household—had withdrawn; and was continued in the library some time beyond his lordship's usual retiring hour. It was for the most part a monologue on the part of the grandfather, broken by occasional words from his companion; and for some time Marcella Boyce herself—the woman whom Aldous desired to marry—was hardly mentioned in it. Oppressed and tormented by a surprise which struck, or seemed to strike, at some of his most cherished ideals and just resentments, Lord Maxwell was bent upon letting his grandson know, in all their fulness, the reasons why no daughter of Richard Boyce could ever be, in the true sense, fit wife for a Raeburn.

Aldous was, of course, perfectly familiar with the creed implied in it all. A Maxwell should give himself no airs whatever, should indeed feel no pride whatever, towards "men of goodwill," whether peasant, professional, or noble. Such airs or such feeling would be both vulgar and unchristian. But when it came to marriage, then it behoved him to see that "the family"—that carefully grafted and selected stock to which he owed so much—should suffer no loss or deterioration through him. Marriage with the fit woman meant for a Raeburn the preservation of a pure blood, of a dignified and honourable family habit, and moreover the securing to his children such an atmosphere of self-respect within, and of consideration from without, as he had himself grown up in. And a woman could not be fit, in this sense, who came either of an insignificant stock, untrained to large uses and opportunities, or of a stock which had degenerated, and lost its right of equal mating with the vigorous owners of unblemished names. Money was of course important and not to be despised, but the present Lord Maxwell, at any rate, large-minded and conscious of wealth he could never spend, laid comparatively little stress upon it; whereas, in his old age, the other instinct had but grown the stronger with him, as the world waxed more democratic, and the influence of the great families waned.

Nor could Aldous pretend to be insensible to such feelings and beliefs. Supposing the daughter could be won, there was no doubt whatever that Richard Boyce would be a cross and burden to a Raeburn son-in-law. But then! After all! Love for once made philosophy easy—made class tradition sit light. Impatience grew; a readiness to believe Richard Boyce as black as Erebus and be done with it,—so that one might get to the point—the real point.

As to the story, it came to this. In his youth, Richard Boyce had been the younger and favourite son of his father. He possessed some ability, some good looks, some manners, all of which were wanting in his loutish elder brother. Sacrifices were accordingly made for him. He was sent to the bar. When he stood for Parliament his election expenses were jubilantly paid, and his father afterwards maintained him with as generous a hand as the estate could possibly bear, often in the teeth of the grudging resentment of Robert his firstborn. Richard showed signs of making a rapid success, at any rate on the political platform. He spoke with facility, and grappled with the drudgery of committees during his first two years at Westminster in a way to win him the favourable attention of the Tory whips. He had a gift for modern languages, and spoke chiefly on foreign affairs, so that when an important Eastern Commission had to be appointed, in connection with some troubles in the Balkan States, his merits and his father's exertions with certain old family friends sufficed to place him upon it.

The Commission was headed by a remarkable man, and was able to do valuable work at a moment of great public interest, under the eyes of Europe. Its members came back covered with distinction, and were much fêted through the London season. Old Mr. Boyce came up from Mellor to see Dick's success for himself, and his rubicund country gentleman's face and white head might have been observed at many a London party beside the small Italianate physique of his son.

And love, as he is wont, came in the wake of fortune. A certain fresh west-country girl, Miss Evelyn Merritt, who had shown her stately beauty at one of the earliest drawing-rooms of the season, fell across Mr. Richard Boyce at this moment when he was most at ease with the world, and the world was giving him every opportunity. She was very young, as unspoilt as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys, and her character—a character of much complexity and stoical strength—was little more known to herself than it was to others. She saw Dick Boyce through a mist of romance; forgot herself absolutely in idealising him, and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked her to marry him.

Five years of Parliament and marriage followed, and then—a crash. It was a common and sordid story, made tragic by the quality of the wife, and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities of Dick Boyce himself. First, the desire to maintain a "position," to make play in society with a pretty wife, and, in the City, with a marketable reputation; then company-promoting of a more and more doubtful kind; and, finally, a swindle more energetic and less skilful than the rest, which bomb-like went to pieces in the face of the public, filling the air with noise, lamentations, and unsavoury odours. Nor was this all. A man has many warnings of ruin, and when things were going badly in the stock market, Richard Boyce, who on his return from the East had been elected by acclamation a member of several fashionable clubs, tried to retrieve himself at the gaming-table. Lastly, when money matters at home and abroad, when the anxieties of his wife and the altered manners of his acquaintance in and out of the House of Commons grew more than usually disagreeable, a certain little chorus girl came upon the scene and served to make both money and repentance scarcer even than they were before. No story could be more commonplace or more detestable.

"Ah, how well I remember that poor old fellow—old John Boyce," said Lord Maxwell, slowly, shaking his stately white head over it, as he leant talking and musing against the mantelpiece. "I saw him the day he came back from the attempt to hush up the company business. I met him in the road, and could not help pulling up to speak to him. I was so sorry for him. We had been friends for many years, he and I. 'Oh, good God!' he said, when he saw me. 'Don't stop me—don't speak to me!' And he lashed his horse up—as white as a sheet—fat, fresh-coloured man that he was in general—and was off. I never saw him again till after his death. First came the trial, and Dick Boyce got three months' imprisonment, on a minor count, while several others of the precious lot he was mixed up with came in for penal servitude. There was some technical flaw in the evidence with regard to him, and the clever lawyers they put on made the most of it; but we all thought, and society thought, that Dick was morally as bad as any of them. Then the papers got hold of the gambling debts and the woman. She made a disturbance at his club, I believe, during the trial, while he was out on bail—anyway it all came out. Two or three other people were implicated in the gambling business—men of good family. Altogether it was one of the biggest scandals I remember in my time."

The old man paused, the long frowning face sternly set. Aldous gazed at him in silence. It was certainly pretty bad—worse than he had thought.

"And the wife and child?" he said presently.

"Oh, poor things!"—said Lord Maxwell, forgetting everything for the moment but his story—"when Boyce's imprisonment was up they disappeared with him. His constituents held indignation meetings, of course. He gave up his seat, and his father allowed him a small fixed income—she had besides some little money of her own—which was secured him afterwards, I believe, on the estate during his brother's lifetime. Some of her people would have gladly persuaded her to leave him, for his behaviour towards her had been particularly odious,—and they were afraid, too, I think, that he might come to worse grief yet and make her life unbearable. But she wouldn't. And she would have no sympathy and no talk. I never saw her after the first year of their marriage, when she was a most radiant and beautiful creature. But, by all accounts of her behaviour at the time, she must be a remarkable woman. One of her family told me that she broke with all of them. She would know nobody who would not know him. Nor would she take money, though they were wretchedly poor; and Dick Boyce was not squeamish. She went off to little lodgings in the country or abroad with him without a word. At the same time, it was plain that her life was withered. She could make one great effort; but, according to my informant, she had no energy left for anything else—not even to take interest in her little girl—"

Aldous made a movement.

"Suppose we talk about her?" he said rather shortly.

Lord Maxwell started and recollected himself. After a pause he said, looking down under his spectacles at his grandson with an expression in which discomfort strove with humour—

"I see. You think we are beating about the bush. Perhaps we are. It is the difference between being old and being young, Aldous, my boy. Well—now then—for Miss Boyce. How much have you seen of her?—how deep has it gone? You can't wonder that I am knocked over. To bring that man amongst us! Why, the hound!" cried the old man, suddenly, "we could not even get him to come and see his father when he was dying. John had lost his memory mostly—had forgotten, anyway, to be angry—and just craved for Dick, for the only creature he had ever loved. With great difficulty I traced the man, and tried my utmost. No good! He came when his father no longer knew him, an hour before the end. His nerves, I understood, were delicate—not so delicate, however, as to prevent his being present at the reading of the will! I have never forgiven him that cruelty to the old man, and never will!"

And Lord Maxwell began to pace the library again, by way of working off memory and indignation.

Aldous watched him rather gloomily. They had now been discussing Boyce's criminalities in great detail for a considerable time, and nothing else seemed to have any power to touch—or, at any rate, to hold—Lord Maxwell's attention. A certain deep pride in Aldous—the pride of intimate affection—felt itself wounded.

"I see that you have grave cause to think badly of her father," he said at last, rising as he spoke. "I must think how it concerns me. And to-morrow you must let me tell you something about her. After all, she has done none of these things. But I ought not to keep you up like this. You will remember Clarke was very emphatic about your not exhausting yourself at night, last time he was here."

Lord Maxwell turned and stared.

"Why—why, what is the matter with you, Aldous? Offended?
Well—well—There—I am an old fool!"

And, walking up to his grandson, he laid an affectionate and rather shaking hand on the younger's shoulder.

"You have a great charge upon you, Aldous—a charge for the future. It has upset me—I shall be calmer to-morrow. But as to any quarrel between us! Are you a youth, or am I a three-tailed bashaw? As to money, you know, I care nothing. But it goes against me, my boy, it goes against me, that your wife should bring such a story as that with her into this house!"

"I understand," said Aldous, wincing. "But you must see her, grandfather. Only, let me say it again—don't for one moment take it for granted that she will marry me. I never saw any one so free, so unspoilt, so unconventional."

His eyes glowed with the pleasure of remembering her looks, her tones.

Lord Maxwell withdrew his hand and shook his head slowly.

"You have a great deal to offer. No woman, unless she were either foolish or totally unexperienced, could overlook that. Is she about twenty?"

"About twenty."

Lord Maxwell waited a moment, then, bending over the fire, shrugged his shoulders in mock despair.

"It is evident you are out of love with me, Aldous. Why, I don't know yet whether she is dark or fair!"

The conversation jarred on both sides. Aldous made an effort.

"She is very dark," he said; "like her mother in many ways, only quite different in colour. To me she seems the most beautiful—the only beautiful woman I have ever seen. I should think she was very clever in some ways—and very unformed—childish almost—in others. The Hardens say she has done everything she could—of course it isn't much—for that miserable village in the time she has been there. Oh! by the way, she is a Socialist. She thinks that all we landowners should be done away with."

Aldous looked round at his grandfather, so soon probably to be one of the lights of a Tory Cabinet, and laughed. So, to his relief, did Lord Maxwell.

"Well, don't let her fall into young Wharton's clutches, Aldous, or he will be setting her to canvas. So, she is beautiful and she is clever—and good, my boy? If she comes here, she will have to fill your mother's and your grandmother's place."

Aldous tried to reply once or twice, but failed.

"If I did not feel that she were everything in herself to be loved and respected"—he said at last with some formality—"I should not long, as I do, to bring you and her together."

Silence fell again. But instinctively Aldous felt that his grandfather's mood had grown gentler—his own task easier. He seized on the moment at once.

"In the whole business," he said, half smiling, "there is only one thing clear, grandfather, and that is, that, if you will, you can do me a great service with Miss Boyce."

Lord Maxwell turned quickly and was all sharp attention, the keen commanding eyes under their fine brows absorbing, as it were, expression and life from the rest of the blanched and wrinkled face.

"You could, if you would, make matters easy for her and her mother in the county," said Aldous, anxious to carry it off lightly. "You could, if you would, without committing yourself to any personal contact with Boyce himself, make it possible for me to bring her here, so that you and my aunt might see her and judge."

The old man's expression darkened.

"What, take back that note, Aldous! I never wrote anything with greater satisfaction in my life!"

"Well,—more or less," said Aldous, quietly. "A very little would do it. A man in Richard Boyce's position will naturally not claim very much—will take what he can get."

"And you mean besides," said his grandfather, interrupting him, "that I must send your aunt to call?"

"It will hardly be possible to ask Miss Boyce here unless she does!" said Aldous.

"And you reckon that I am not likely to go to Mellor, even to see her? And you want me to say a word to other people—to the Winterbournes and the Levens, for instance?"

"Precisely," said Aldous.

Lord Maxwell meditated; then rose.

"Let me now appease the memory of Clarke by going to bed!" (Clarke was his lordship's medical attendant and autocrat.) "I must sleep upon this, Aldous."

"I only hope I shall not have tired you out."

Aldous moved to extinguish a lamp standing on a table near.

Suddenly his grandfather called him.

"Aldous!"

"Yes."

But, as no words followed, Aldous turned. He saw his grandfather standing erect before the fire, and was startled by the emotion he instantly perceived in eye and mouth.

"You understand, Aldous, that for twenty years—it is twenty years last month since your father died—you have been the blessing of my life? Oh! don't say anything, my boy; I don't want any more agitation. I have spoken strongly; it was hardly possible but that on such a matter I should feel strongly. But don't go away misunderstanding me—don't imagine for one instant that there is anything in the world that really matters to me in comparison with your happiness and your future!"

The venerable old man wrung the hand he held, walked quickly to the door, and shut it behind him.

* * * * *

An hour later, Aldous was writing in his own sitting-room, a room on the first floor, at the western corner of the house, and commanding by daylight the falling slopes of wood below the Court, and all the wide expanses of the plain. To-night, too, the blinds were up, and the great view drawn in black and pearl, streaked with white mists in the ground hollows and overarched by a wide sky holding a haloed moon, lay spread before the windows. On a clear night Aldous felt himself stifled by blinds and curtains, and would often sit late, reading and writing, with a lamp so screened that it threw light upon his book or paper, while not interfering with the full range of his eye over the night-world without. He secretly believed that human beings see far too little of the night, and so lose a host of august or beautiful impressions, which might be honestly theirs if they pleased, without borrowing or stealing from anybody, poet or painter.

The room was lined with books, partly temporary visitors from the great library downstairs, partly his old college books and prizes, and partly representing small collections for special studies. Here were a large number of volumes, blue books, and pamphlets, bearing on the condition of agriculture and the rural poor in England and abroad; there were some shelves devoted to general economics, and on a little table by the fire lay the recent numbers of various economic journals, English and foreign. Between the windows stood a small philosophical bookcase, the volumes of it full of small reference slips, and marked from end to end; and on the other side of the room was a revolving book-table crowded with miscellaneous volumes of poets, critics, and novelists—mainly, however, with the first two. Aldous Raeburn read few novels, and those with a certain impatience. His mind was mostly engaged in a slow wrestle with difficult and unmanageable fact; and for that transformation and illumination of fact in which the man of idealist temper must sometimes take refuge and comfort, he went easily and eagerly to the poets and to natural beauty. Hardly any novel writing, or reading, seemed to him worth while. A man, he thought, might be much better employed than in doing either.

Above the mantelpiece was his mother's picture—the picture of a young woman in a low dress and muslin scarf, trivial and empty in point of art, yet linked in Aldous's mind with a hundred touching recollections, buried all of them in the silence of an unbroken reserve. She had died in childbirth when he was nine; her baby had died with her, and her husband, Lord Maxwell's only son and surviving child, fell a victim two years later to a deadly form of throat disease, one of those ills which come upon strong men by surprise, and excite in the dying a sense of helpless wrong which even religious faith can only partially soothe.

Aldous remembered his mother's death; still more his father's, that father who could speak no last message to his son, could only lie dumb upon his pillows, with those eyes full of incommunicable pain, and the hand now restlessly seeking, now restlessly putting aside the small and trembling hand of the son. His boyhood had been spent under the shadow of these events, which had aged his grandfather, and made him too early realise himself as standing alone in the gap of loss, the only hope left to affection and to ambition. This premature development, amid the most melancholy surroundings, of the sense of personal importance—not in any egotistical sense, but as a sheer matter of fact—had robbed a nervous and sensitive temperament of natural stores of gaiety and elasticity which it could ill do without. Aldous Raeburn had been too much thought for and too painfully loved. But for Edward Hallin he might well have acquiesced at manhood in a certain impaired vitality, in the scholar's range of pleasures, and the landowner's customary round of duties.

It was to Edward Hallin he was writing to-night, for the stress and stir of feeling caused by the events of the day, and not least by his grandfather's outburst, seemed to put sleep far off. On the table before him stood a photograph of Hallin, besides a miniature of his mother as a girl. He had drawn the miniature closer to him, finding sympathy and joy in its youth, in the bright expectancy of the eyes, and so wrote, as it were, having both her and his friend in mind and sight.

To Hallin he had already spoken of Miss Boyce, drawing her in light, casual, and yet sympathetic strokes as the pretty girl in a difficult position whom one would watch with curiosity and some pity. To-night his letter, which should have discussed a home colonisation scheme of Hallin's, had but one topic, and his pen flew.

"Would you call her beautiful? I ask myself again and again, trying to put myself behind your eyes. She has nothing, at any rate, in common with the beauties we have down here, or with those my aunt bade me admire in London last May. The face has a strong Italian look, but not Italian of to-day. Do you remember the Ghirlandajo frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, or the side groups in Andrea's frescoes at the Annunziata? Among them, among the beautiful tall women of them, there are, I am sure, noble, freely-poised, suggestive heads like hers—hair, black wavy hair, folded like hers in large simple lines, and faces with the same long, subtle curves. It is a face of the Renaissance, extraordinarily beautiful, as it seems to me, in colour and expression; imperfect in line, as the beauty which marks the meeting point between antique perfection and modern character must always be. It has morbidezza—unquiet melancholy charm, then passionate gaiety—everything that is most modern grafted on things Greek and old. I am told that Burne Jones drew her several times while she was in London, with delight. It is the most artistic beauty, having both the harmonies and the dissonances that a full-grown art loves.

"She may be twenty or rather more. The mind has all sorts of ability; comes to the right conclusion by a divine instinct, ignoring the how and why. What does such a being want with the drudgery of learning? to such keenness life will be master enough. Yet she has evidently read a good deal—much poetry, some scattered political economy, some modern socialistic books, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle. She takes everything dramatically, imaginatively, goes straight from it to life, and back again. Among the young people with whom she made acquaintance while she was boarding in London and working at South Kensington, there seem to have been two brothers, both artists, and both Socialists; ardent young fellows, giving all their spare time to good works, who must have influenced her a great deal. She is full of angers and revolts, which you would delight in. And first of all, she is applying herself to her father's wretched village, which will keep her hands full. A large and passionate humanity plays about her. What she says often seems to me foolish—in the ear; but the inner sense, the heart of it, command me.

"Stare as you please, Ned! Only write to me, and come down here as soon as you can. I can and will hide nothing from you, so you will believe me when I say that all is uncertain, that I know nothing, and, though I hope everything, may just as well fear everything too. But somehow I am another man, and the world shines and glows for me by day and night."

Aldous Raeburn rose from his chair and, going to the window, stood looking out at the splendour of the autumn moon. Marcella moved across the whiteness of the grass; her voice was still speaking to his inward ear. His lips smiled; his heart was in a wild whirl of happiness.

Then he walked to the table, took up his letter, read it, tore it across, and locked the fragments in a drawer.

"Not yet, Ned—not yet, dear old fellow, even to you," he said to himself, as he put out his lamp.

CHAPTER VII.

Three days passed. On the fourth Marcella returned late in the afternoon from a round of parish visits with Mary Harden. As she opened the oak doors which shut off the central hall of Mellor from the outer vestibule, she saw something white lying on the old cut and disused billiard table, which still occupied the middle of the floor till Richard Boyce, in the course of his economies and improvements, could replace it by a new one.

She ran forward and took up a sheaf of cards, turning them over in a
smiling excitement. "Viscount Maxwell," "Mr. Raeburn," "Miss Raeburn,"
"Lady Winterbourne and the Misses Winterbourne," two cards of Lord
Winterbourne's—all perfectly in form.

Then a thought flashed upon her. "Of course it is his doing—and I asked him!"

The cards dropped from her hand on the billiard table, and she stood looking at them, her pride fighting with her pleasure. There was something else in her feeling too—the exultation of proved power over a person not, as she guessed, easily influenced, especially by women.

"Marcella, is that you?"

It was her mother's voice. Mrs. Boyce had come in from the garden through the drawing-room, and was standing at the inner door of the hall, trying with shortsighted eyes to distinguish her daughter among the shadows of the great bare place. A dark day was drawing to its close, and there was little light left in the hall, except in one corner where a rainy sunset gleam struck a grim contemporary portrait of Mary Tudor, bringing out the obstinate mouth and the white hand holding a jewelled glove.

Marcella turned, and by the same gleam her mother saw her flushed and animated look.

"Any letters?" she asked.

"No; but there are some cards. Oh yes, there is a note," and she pounced upon an envelope she had overlooked. "It is for you, mother—from the Court."

Mrs. Boyce came up and took note and cards from her daughter's hand.
Marcella watched her with quick breath.

Her mother looked through the cards, slowly putting them down one by one without remark.

"Oh, mother! do read the note!" Marcella could not help entreating.

Mrs. Boyce drew herself together with a quick movement as though her daughter jarred upon her, and opened the note. Marcella dared not look over her. There was a dignity about her mother's lightest action, about every movement of her slender fingers and fine fair head, which had always held the daughter in check, even while she rebelled.

Mrs. Boyce read it, and then handed it to Marcella.

"I must go and make the tea," she said, in a light, cold tone, and turning, she went back to the drawing-room, whither afternoon tea had just been carried.

Marcella followed, reading. The note was from Miss Raeburn, and it contained an invitation to Mrs. Boyce and her daughter to take luncheon at the Court on the following Friday. The note was courteously and kindly worded. "We should be so glad," said the writer, "to show you and Miss Boyce our beautiful woods while they are still at their best, in the way of autumn colour."

"How will mamma take it?" thought Marcella anxiously. "There is not a word of papa!"

When she entered the drawing-room, she caught her mother standing absently at the tea-table. The little silver caddy was still in her hand as though she had forgotten to put it down; and her eyes, which evidently saw nothing, were turned to the window, the brows frowning. The look of suffering for an instant was unmistakable; then she started at the sound of Marcella's step, and put down the caddy amid the delicate china crowded on the tray, with all the quiet precision of her ordinary manner.

"You will have to wait for your tea," she said, "the water doesn't nearly boil."

Marcella went up to the fire and, kneeling before it, put the logs with which it was piled together. But she could not contain herself for long.

"Will you go to the Court, mamma?" she asked quickly, without turning round.

There was a pause. Then Mrs. Boyce said drily—

"Miss Raeburn's proceedings are a little unexpected. We have been here four months, within two miles of her, and it has never occurred to her to call. Now she calls and asks us to luncheon in the same afternoon. Either she took too little notice of us before, or she takes too much now—don't you think so?"

Marcella was silent a moment. Should she confess? It began to occur to her for the first time that in her wild independence she had been taking liberties with her mother.

"Mamma!"

"Yes."

"I asked Mr. Aldous Raeburn the other day whether everybody here was going to cut us! Papa told me that Lord Maxwell had written him an uncivil letter and—"

"You—asked—Mr. Raeburn—" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly. "What do you mean?"

Marcella turned round and met the flash of her mother's eyes.

"I couldn't help it," she said in a low hurried voice. "It seemed so horrid to feel everybody standing aloof—we were walking together—he was very kind and friendly—and I asked him to explain."

"I see!" said Mrs. Boyce. "And he went to his aunt—and she went to Lady Winterbourne—they were compassionate—and there are the cards. You have certainly taken us all in hand, Marcella!"

Marcella felt an instant's fear—fear of the ironic power in the sparkling look so keenly fixed on her offending self; she shrank before the proud reserve expressed in every line of her mother's fragile imperious beauty. Then a cry of nature broke from the girl.

"You have got used to it, mamma! I feel as if it would kill me to live here, shut off from everybody—joining with nobody—with no friendly feelings or society. It was bad enough in the old lodging-house days; but here—why should we?"

Mrs. Boyce had certainly grown pale.

"I supposed you would ask sooner or later," she said in a low determined voice, with what to Marcella was a quite new note of reality in it. "Probably Mr. Raeburn told you—but you must of course have guessed it long ago—that society does not look kindly on us—and has its reasons. I do not deny in the least that it has its reasons. I do not accuse anybody, and resent nothing. But the question with me has always been, Shall I accept pity? I have always been able to meet it with a No! You are very different from me—but for you also I believe it would be the happiest answer."

The eyes of both met—the mother's full of an indomitable fire which had for once wholly swept away her satiric calm of every day; the daughter's troubled and miserable.

"I want friends!" said Marcella, slowly. "There are so many things I want to do here, and one can do nothing if every one is against you. People would be friends with you and me—and with papa too,—through us. Some of them wish to be kind"—she added insistently, thinking of Aldous Raeburn's words and expression as he bent to her at the gate—"I know they do. And if we can't hold our heads high because—because of things in the past—ought we to be so proud that we won't take their hands when they stretch them out—when they write so kindly and nicely as this?"

And she laid her fingers almost piteously on the note upon her knee.

Mrs. Boyce tilted the silver urn and replenished the tea-pot. Then with a delicate handkerchief she rubbed away a spot from the handle of a spoon near her.

"You shall go," she said presently—"you wish it—then go—go by all means. I will write to Miss Raeburn and send you over in the carriage. One can put a great deal on health—mine is quite serviceable in the way of excuses. I will try and do you no harm, Marcella. If you have chosen your line and wish to make friends here—very well—I will do what I can for you so long as you do not expect me to change my life—for which, my dear, I am grown too crotchety and too old."

Marcella looked at her with dismay and a yearning she had never felt before.

"And you will never go out with me, mamma?"

There was something childlike and touching in the voice, something which for once suggested the normal filial relation. But Mrs. Boyce did not waver. She had long learnt perhaps to regard Marcella as a girl singularly well able to take care of herself; and had recognised the fact with relief.

"I will not go to the Court with you anyway," she said, daintily sipping her tea—"in your interests as well as mine. You will make all the greater impression, my dear, for I have really forgotten how to behave. Those cards shall be properly returned, of course. For the rest—let no one disturb themselves till they must. And if I were you, Marcella, I would hardly discuss the family affairs any more—with Mr. Raeburn or anybody else."

And again her keen glance disconcerted the tall handsome girl, whose power over the world about her had never extended to her mother. Marcella flushed and played with the fire.

"You see, mamma," she said after a moment, still looking at the logs and the shower of sparks they made as she moved them about, "you never let me discuss them with you."

"Heaven forbid!" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly; then, after a pause: "You will find your own line in a little while, Marcella, and you will see, if you so choose it, that there will be nothing unsurmountable in your way. One piece of advice let me give you. Don't be too grateful to Miss Raeburn, or anybody else! You take great interest in your Boyce belongings, I perceive. You may remember too, perhaps, that there is other blood in you—and that no Merritt has ever submitted quietly to either patronage or pity."

Marcella started. Her mother had never named her own kindred to her before that she could remember. She had known for many years that there was a breach between the Merritts and themselves. The newspapers had told her something at intervals of her Merritt relations, for they were fashionable and important folk, but no one of them had crossed the Boyces' threshold since the old London days, wherein Marcella could still dimly remember the tall forms of certain Merritt uncles, and even a stately lady in a white cap whom she knew to have been her mother's mother. The stately lady had died while she was still a child at her first school; she could recollect her own mourning frock; but that was almost the last personal remembrance she had, connected with the Merritts.

And now this note of intense personal and family pride, under which Mrs. Boyce's voice had for the first time quivered a little! Marcella had never heard it before, and it thrilled her. She sat on by the fire, drinking her tea and every now and then watching her companion with a new and painful curiosity. The tacit assumption of many years with her had been that her mother was a dry limited person, clever and determined in small ways, that affected her own family, but on the whole characterless as compared with other people of strong feelings and responsive susceptibilities. But her own character had been rapidly maturing of late, and her insight sharpening. During these recent weeks of close contact, her mother's singularity had risen in her mind to the dignity at least of a problem, an enigma.

Presently Mrs. Boyce rose and put the scones down by the fire.

"Your father will be in, I suppose. Yes, I hear the front door."

As she spoke she took off her velvet cloak, put it carefully aside on a sofa, and sat down again, still in her bonnet, at the tea-table. Her dress was very different from Marcella's, which, when they were not in mourning, was in general of the ample "aesthetic" type, and gave her a good deal of trouble out of doors. Marcella wore "art serges" and velveteens; Mrs. Boyce attired herself in soft and costly silks, generally black, closely and fashionably made, and completed by various fanciful and distinguished trifles—rings, an old chatelaine, a diamond brooch—which Marcella remembered, the same, and worn in the same way, since her childhood. Mrs. Boyce, however, wore her clothes so daintily, and took such scrupulous and ingenious care of them, that her dress cost, in truth, extremely little—certainly less than Marcella's.

There were sounds first of footsteps in the hall, then of some scolding of William, and finally Mr. Boyce entered, tired and splashed from shooting, and evidently in a bad temper.

"Well, what are you going to do about those cards?" he asked his wife abruptly when she had supplied him with tea, and he was beginning to dry by the fire. He was feeling ill and reckless; too tired anyway to trouble himself to keep up appearances with Marcella.

"Return them," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly, blowing out the flame of her silver kettle.

"I don't want any of their precious society," he said irritably. "They should have done their calling long ago. There's no grace in it now; I don't know that one isn't inclined to think it an intrusion."

But the women were silent. Marcella's attention was diverted from her mother to the father's small dark head and thin face. There was a great repulsion and impatience in her heart, an angry straining against circumstance and fate; yet at the same time a mounting voice of natural affection, an understanding at once sad and new, which paralysed and silenced her. He stood in her way—terribly in her way—and yet it strangely seemed to her, that never before till these last few weeks had she felt herself a daughter.

"You are very wet, papa," she said to him as she took his cup; "don't you think you had better go at once and change?"

"I'm all right," he said shortly—"as right as I'm likely to be, anyway. As for the shooting, it's nothing but waste of time and shoe leather. I shan't go out any more. The place has been clean swept by some of those brutes in the village—your friends, Marcella. By the way, Evelyn, I came across young Wharton in the road just now."

"Wharton?" said his wife, interrogatively. "I don't remember—ought I?"

"Why, the Liberal candidate for the division, of course," he said testily. "I wish you would inform yourself of what goes on. He is working like a horse, he tells me. Dodgson, the Raeburns' candidate, has got a great start; this young man will want all his time to catch him up. I like him. I won't vote for him; but I'll see fair play. I've asked him to come to tea here on Saturday, Evelyn. He'll be back again by the end of the week. He stays at Dell's farm when he comes—pretty bad accommodation, I should think. We must show him some civility."

He rose and stood with his back to the fire, his spare frame stiffening under his nervous determination to assert himself—to hold up his head physically and morally against those who would repress him.

Richard Boyce took his social punishment badly. He had passed his first weeks at Mellor in a tremble of desire that his father's old family and country friends should recognise him again and condone his "irregularities." All sorts of conciliatory ideas had passed through his head. He meant to let people see that he would be a good neighbour if they would give him the chance—not like that miserly fool, his brother Robert. The past was so much past; who now was more respectable or more well intentioned than he? He was an impressionable imaginative man in delicate health; and the tears sometimes came into his eyes as he pictured himself restored to society—partly by his own efforts, partly, no doubt, by the charms and good looks of his wife and daughter—forgiven for their sake, and for the sake also of that store of virtue he had so laboriously accumulated since that long-past catastrophe. Would not most men have gone to the bad altogether, after such a lapse? He, on the contrary, had recovered himself, had neither drunk nor squandered, nor deserted his wife and child. These things, if the truth were known, were indeed due rather to a certain lack of physical energy and vitality, which age had developed in him, than to self-conquest; but he was no doubt entitled to make the most of them. There were signs indeed that his forecast had been not at all unreasonable. His womenkind were making their way. At the very moment when Lord Maxwell had written him a quelling letter, he had become aware that Marcella was on good terms with Lord Maxwell's heir. Had he not also been stopped that morning in a remote lane by Lord Winterbourne and Lord Maxwell on their way back from the meet, and had not both recognised and shaken hands with him? And now there were these cards.

Unfortunately, in spite of Raeburn's opinion to the contrary, no man in such a position and with such a temperament ever gets something without claiming more—and more than he can conceivably or possibly get. Startled and pleased at first by the salutation which Lord Maxwell and his companion had bestowed upon him, Richard Boyce had passed his afternoon in resenting and brooding over the cold civility of it. So these were the terms he was to be on with them—the deuce take them and their pharisaical airs! If all the truth were known, most men would look foolish; and the men who thanked God that they were not as other men, soonest of all. He wished he had not been taken by surprise; he wished he had not answered them; he would show them in the future that he would eat no dirt for them or anybody else.

So on the way home there had been a particular zest in his chance encounter with the young man who was likely to give the Raeburns and their candidate—so all the world said—a very great deal of trouble. The seat had been held to be an entirely safe one for the Maxwell nominee. Young Wharton, on the contrary, was making way every day, and, what with securing Aldous's own seat in the next division, and helping old Dodgson in this, Lord Maxwell and his grandson had their hands full. Dick Boyce was glad of it. He was a Tory; but all the same he wished every success to this handsome, agreeable young man, whose deferential manners to him at the end of the day had come like ointment to a wound.

The three sat on together for a little while in silence. Marcella kept her seat by the fire on the old gilt fenderstool, conscious in a dreamlike way of the room in front of her—the stately room with its stucco ceiling, its tall windows, its Prussian-blue wall-paper behind the old cabinets and faded pictures, and the chair covers in Turkey-red twill against the blue, which still remained to bear witness at once to the domestic economies and the decorative ideas of old Robert Boyce—conscious also of the figures on either side of her, and of her own quick-beating youth betwixt them. She was sore and unhappy; yet, on the whole, what she was thinking most about was Aldous Raeburn. What had he said to Lord Maxwell?—and to the Winterbournes? She wished she could know. She wished with leaping pulse that she could see him again quickly. Yet it would be awkward too.

* * * * *

Presently she got up and went away to take off her things. As the door closed behind her, Mrs. Boyce held out Miss Raeburn's note, which Marcella had returned to her, to her husband.

"They have asked Marcella and me to lunch," she said. "I am not going, but I shall send her."

He read the note by the firelight, and it produced the most contradictory effects upon him.

"Why don't you go?" he asked her aggressively, rousing himself for a moment to attack her, and so vent some of his ill-humour.

"I have lost the habit of going out," she said quietly, "and am too old to begin again."

"What! you mean to say," he asked her angrily, raising his voice, "that you have never meant to do your duties here—the duties of your position?"

"I did not foresee many, outside this house and land. Why should we change our ways? We have done very well of late. I have no mind to risk what I have got."

He glanced round at her in a quick nervous way, and then looked back again at the fire. The sight of her delicate blanched face had in some respects a more and more poignant power with him as the years went on. His anger sank into moroseness.

"Then why do you let Marcella go? What good will it do her to go about without her parents? People will only despise her for a girl of no spirit—as they ought."

"It depends upon how it is done. I can arrange it, I think," said Mrs. Boyce. "A woman has always convenient limitations to plead in the way of health. She need never give offence if she has decent wits. It will be understood that I do not go out, and then someone—Miss Raeburn or Lady Winterbourne—will take up Marcella and mother her."

She spoke with her usual light gentleness, but he was not appeased.

"If you were to talk of my health, it would be more to the purpose," he said, with grim inconsequence. And raising his heavy lids he looked at her full.

She got up and went over to him.

"Do you feel worse again? Why will you not change your things directly you come in? Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?"

She was standing close beside him; her beautiful hand, for which in their young days it had pleased his pride to give her rings, almost touched him. A passionate hunger leapt within him. She would stoop and kiss him if he asked her; he knew that. But he would not ask her; he did not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give him again.

Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.

"Clarke does me no good—not an atom," he said, rising. "There—don't you come. I Can look after myself."

He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room. She put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so stood silent for long. There was no sound audible in the room, or from the house outside. And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor God.

* * * * *

"I shall go, for all our sakes," thought Marcella, as she stood late that night brushing her hair before her dimly-lighted and rickety dressing-table. "We have, it seems, no right to be proud."

A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart—pain, new-born and insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself. Ever since Aldous Raeburn's hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden invasion of a hot and shamed misery. And to-night, after her talk with her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.

But her strong personality, her passionate sense of a moral independence not to be undone by the acts of another, even a father, made her soon impatient of her own distress, and she flung it from her with decision.

"No, we have no right to be proud," she repeated to herself. "It must be all true what Mr. Raeburn said—probably a great deal more. Poor, poor mamma! But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty quarrelling and standing alone. And it was so long ago."

Her hand fell, and she stood absently looking at her own black and white reflection in the old flawed glass.

She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn. He had been very prompt in her service. There could be no question but that he was specially interested in her.

And he was not a man to be lightly played upon—nay, rather a singularly reserved and scrupulous person. So, at least, it had been always held concerning him. Marcella was triumphantly conscious that he had not from the beginning given her much trouble. But the common report of him made his recent manner towards her, this last action of his, the more significant. Even the Hardens—so Marcella gathered from her friend and admirer Mary—unworldly dreamy folk, wrapt up in good works, and in the hastening of Christ's kingdom, were on the alert and beginning to take note.

It was not as though he were in the dark as to her antecedents. He knew all—at any rate, more than she did—and yet it might end in his asking her to marry him. What then?

Scarcely a quiver in the young form before the glass! Love, at such a thought, must have sunk upon its knees and hid its face for tender humbleness and requital. Marcella only looked quietly at the beauty which might easily prove to be so important an arrow in her quiver.

What was stirring in her was really a passionate ambition—ambition to be the queen and arbitress of human lives—to be believed in by her friends, to make a mark for herself among women, and to make it in the most romantic and yet natural way, without what had always seemed to her the sordid and unpleasant drudgeries of the platform, of a tiresome co-operation with, or subordination to others who could not understand your ideas.

Of course, if it happened, people would say that she had tried to capture Aldous Raeburn for his money and position's sake. Let them say it. People with base minds must think basely; there was no help for it. Those whom she would make her friends would know very well for what purpose she wanted money, power, and the support of such a man, and such a marriage. Her modern realism played with the thought quite freely; her maidenliness, proud and pure as it was, being nowise ashamed. Oh! for something to carry her deep into life; into the heart of its widest and most splendid opportunities!

She threw up her hands, clasping them above her head amid her clouds of curly hair—a girlish excited gesture.

"I could revive the straw-plaiting; give them better teaching and better models. The cottages should be rebuilt. Papa would willingly hand the village over to me if I found the money! We would have a parish committee to deal with the charities—oh! the Hardens would come in. The old people should have their pensions as of right. No hopeless old age, no cringing dependence! We would try co-operation on the land, and pull it through. And not in Mellor only. One might be the ruler, the regenerator of half a county!"

Memory brought to mind in vivid sequence the figures and incidents of the afternoon, of her village round with Mary Harden.

"As the eyes of servants towards the hand of their mistress"—the old words occurred to her as she thought of herself stepping in and out of the cottages. Then she was ashamed of herself and rejected the image with vehemence. Dependence was the curse of the poor. Her whole aim, of course, should be to teach them to stand on their own feet, to know themselves as men. But naturally they would be grateful, they would let themselves be led. Intelligence and enthusiasm give power, and ought to give it—power for good. No doubt, under Socialism, there will be less scope for either, because there will be less need. But Socialism, as a system, will not come in our generation. What we have to think for is the transition period. The Cravens had never seen that, but Marcella saw it. She began to feel herself a person of larger experience than they.

As she undressed, it seemed to her as though she still felt the clinging hands of the Hurd children round her knees, and through them, symbolised by them, the suppliant touch of hundreds of other helpless creatures.

She was just dropping to sleep when her own words to Aldous Raeburn flashed across her,—

"Everybody is so ready to take charge of other people's lives, and look at the result!"

She must needs laugh at herself, but it made little matter. She fell asleep cradled in dreams. Aldous Raeburn's final part in them was not great!

CHAPTER VIII.

Mrs. Boyce wrote her note to Miss Raeburn, a note containing cold though civil excuses as to herself, while accepting the invitation for Marcella, who should be sent to the Court, either in the carriage or under the escort of a maid who could bring her back. Marcella found her mother inclined to insist punctiliously on conventions of this kind. It amused her, in submitting to them, to remember the free and easy ways of her London life. But she submitted—and not unwillingly.

On the afternoon of the day which intervened between the Maxwells' call and her introduction to the Court, Marcella walked as usual down to the village. She was teeming with plans for her new kingdom, and could not keep herself out of it. And an entry in one of the local papers had suggested to her that Hurd might possibly find work in a parish some miles from Mellor. She must go and send him off there.

When Mrs. Hurd opened the door to her, Marcella was astonished to perceive behind her the forms of several other persons filling up the narrow space of the usually solitary cottage—in fact, a tea-party.

"Oh, come in, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, with some embarrassment, as though it occurred to her that her visitor might legitimately wonder to find a person of her penury entertaining company. Then, lowering her voice, she hurriedly explained: "There's Mrs. Brunt come in this afternoon to help me wi' the washin' while I finished my score of plait for the woman who takes 'em into town to-morrow. And there's old Patton an' his wife—you know 'em, miss?—them as lives in the parish houses top o' the common. He's walked out a few steps to-day. It's not often he's able, and when I see him through the door I said to 'em, 'if you'll come in an' take a cheer, I dessay them tea-leaves 'ull stan' another wettin'. I haven't got nothink else.' And there's Mrs. Jellison, she came in along o' the Pattons. You can't say her no, she's a queer one. Do you know her, miss?"

"Oh, bless yer, yes, yes. She knows me!" said a high, jocular voice, making Mrs. Hurd start; "she couldn't be long hereabouts without makkin' eëaste to know me. You coom in, miss. We're not afraid o' you—Lor' bless you!"

Mrs. Hurd stood aside for her visitor to pass in, looking round her the while, in some perplexity, to see whether there was a spare chair and room to place it. She was a delicate, willowy woman, still young in figure, with a fresh colour, belied by the grey circles under the eyes and the pinched sharpness of the features. The upper lip, which was pretty and childish, was raised a little over the teeth; the whole expression of the slightly open mouth was unusually soft and sensitive. On the whole, Minta Hurd was liked in the village, though she was thought a trifle "fine." The whole family, indeed, "kept theirsels to theirsels," and to find Mrs. Hurd with company was unusual. Her name, of course, was short for Araminta.

Marcella laughed as she caught Mrs. Jellison's remarks, and made her way in, delighted. For the present, these village people affected her like figures in poetry or drama. She saw them with the eye of the imagination through a medium provided by Socialist discussion, or by certain phases of modern art; and the little scene of Mrs. Hurd's tea-party took for her in an instant the dramatic zest and glamour.

"Look here, Mrs. Jellison," she said, going up to her; "I was just going to leave these apples for your grandson. Perhaps you'll take them, now you're here. They're quite sweet, though they look green. They're the best we've got, the gardener says."

"Oh, they are, are they?" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly, looking up at her. "Well, put 'em down, miss. I dare say he'll eat 'em. He eats most things, and don't want no doctor's stuff nayther, though his mother do keep on at me for spoilin' his stummuck."

"You are just fond of that boy, aren't you, Mrs. Jellison?" said Marcella, taking a wooden stool, the only piece of furniture left in the tiny cottage on which it was possible to sit, and squeezing herself into a corner by the fire, whence she commanded the whole group. "No! don't you turn Mr. Patton out of that chair, Mrs. Hurd, or I shall have to go away."

For Mrs. Hurd, in her anxiety, was whispering in old Patton's ear that it might be well for him to give up her one wooden arm-chair, in which he was established, to Miss Boyce. But he, being old, deaf, and rheumatic, was slow to move, and Marcella's peremptory gesture bade her leave him in peace.

"Well, it's you that's the young 'un, ain't it, miss?" said Mrs. Jellison, cheerfully. "Poor old Patton, he do get slow on his legs, don't you, Patton? But there, there's no helping it when you're turned of eighty."

And she turned upon him a bright, philosophic eye, being herself a young thing not much over seventy, and energetic accordingly. Mrs. Jellison passed for the village wit, and was at least talkative and excitable beyond her fellows.

"Well, you don't seem to mind getting old, Mrs. Jellison," said
Marcella, smiling at her.

The eyes of all the old people round their tea-table were by now drawn irresistibly to Miss Boyce in the chimney corner, to her slim grace, and the splendour of her large black hat and feathers. The new squire's daughter had so far taken them by surprise. Some of them, however, were by now in the second stage of critical observation—none the less critical because furtive and inarticulate.

"Ah?" said Mrs. Jellison, interrogatively, with a high, long-drawn note peculiar to her. "Well, I've never found you get forrarder wi' snarlin' over what you can't help. And there's mercies. When you've had a husband in his bed for fower year, miss, and he's took at last, you'll know."

She nodded emphatically. Marcella laughed.

"I know you were very fond of him, Mrs. Jellison, and looked after him very well, too."

"Oh, I don't say nothin' about that," said Mrs. Jellison, hastily. "But all the same you kin reckon it up, and see for yoursen. Fower year—an' fire upstairs, an' fire downstairs, an' fire all night, an' soomthin' allus wanted. An' he such an objeck afore he died! It do seem like a holiday now to sit a bit."

And she crossed her hands on her lap with a long breath of content. A lock of grey hair had escaped from her bonnet, across her wrinkled forehead, and gave her a half-careless rakish air. Her youth of long ago—a youth of mad spirits, and of an extraordinary capacity for physical enjoyment, seemed at times to pierce to the surface again, even through her load of years. But in general she had a dreamy, sunny look, as of one fed with humorous fancies, but disinclined often to the trouble of communicating them.

"Well, I missed my daughter, I kin tell you," said Mrs. Brunt, with a sigh, "though she took a deal more lookin' after nor your good man, Mrs. Jellison."

Mrs. Brunt was a gentle, pretty old woman, who lived in another of the village almshouses, next door to the Pattons, and was always ready to help her neighbours in their domestic toils. Her last remaining daughter, the victim of a horrible spinal disease, had died some nine or ten months before the Boyces arrived at Mellor. Marcella had already heard the story several times, but it was part of her social gift that she was a good listener to such things even at the twentieth hearing.

"You wouldn't have her back though," she said gently, turning towards the speaker.

"No, I wouldn't have her back, miss," said Mrs. Brunt, raising her hand to brush away a tear, partly the result of feeling, partly of a long-established habit. "But I do miss her nights terrible! 'Mother, ain't it ten o'clock?—mother, look at the clock, do, mother—ain't it time for my stuff, mother—oh, I do hope it is.' That was her stuff, miss, to make her sleep. And when she'd got it, she'd groan—you'd think she couldn't be asleep, and yet she was, dead-like—for two hours. I didn't get no rest with her, and now I don't seem to get no rest without her."

And again Mrs. Brunt put her hand up to her eyes.

"Ah, you were allus one for toilin' an' frettin'," said Mrs. Jellison, calmly. "A body must get through wi' it when it's there, but I don't hold wi' thinkin' about it when it's done."

"I know one," said old Patton, slily, "that fretted about her darter when it didn't do her no good."

He had not spoken so far, but had sat with his hands on his stick, a spectator of the women's humours. He was a little hunched man, twisted and bent double with rheumatic gout, the fruit of seventy years of field work. His small face was almost lost, dog-like, under shaggy hair and overgrown eyebrows, both snow-white. He had a look of irritable eagerness, seldom, however, expressed in words. A sudden passion in the faded blue eyes; a quick spot of red in his old cheeks; these Marcella had often noticed in him, as though the flame of some inner furnace leapt. He had been a Radical and a rebel once in old rick-burning days, long before he lost the power in his limbs and came down to be thankful for one of the parish almshouses. To his social betters he was now a quiet and peaceable old man, well aware of the cakes and ale to be got by good manners; but in the depths of him there were reminiscences and the ghosts of passions, which were still stirred sometimes by causes not always intelligible to the bystander.

He had rarely, however, physical energy enough to bring any emotion—even of mere worry at his physical ills—to the birth. The pathetic silence of age enwrapped him more and more. Still he could gibe the women sometimes, especially Mrs. Jellison, who was in general too clever for her company.

"Oh, you may talk, Patton!" said Mrs. Jellison, with a little flash of excitement. "You do like to have your talk, don't you! Well, I dare say I was orkard with Isabella. I won't go for to say I wasn't orkard, for I was. She should ha' used me to 't before, if she wor took that way. She and I had just settled down comfortable after my old man went, and I didn't see no sense in it, an' I don't now. She might ha' let the men alone. She'd seen enough o' the worrit ov 'em."

"Well, she did well for hersen," said Mrs. Brunt, with the same gentle melancholy. "She married a stiddy man as 'ull keep her well all her time, and never let her want for nothink."

"A sour, wooden-faced chap as iver I knew," said Mrs. Jellison, grudgingly. "I don't have nothink to say to him, nor he to me. He thinks hissen the Grand Turk, he do, since they gi'en him his uniform, and made him full keeper. A nassty, domineerin' sort, I calls him. He's allus makin' bad blood wi' the yoong fellers when he don't need. It's the way he's got wi' 'im. But I don't make no account of 'im, an' I let 'im see 't."

All the tea-party grinned except Mrs. Hurd. The village was well acquainted with the feud between Mrs. Jellison and her son-in-law, George Westall, who had persuaded Isabella Jellison at the mature age of thirty-five to leave her mother and marry him, and was now one of Lord Maxwell's keepers, with good pay, and an excellent cottage some little way out of the village. Mrs. Jellison had never forgiven her daughter for deserting her, and was on lively terms of hostility with her son-in-law; but their only child, little Johnnie, had found the soft spot in his grandmother, and her favourite excitement in life, now that he was four years old, was to steal him from his parents and feed him on the things of which Isabella most vigorously disapproved.

Mrs. Hurd, as has been said, did not smile. At the mention of Westall, she got up hastily, and began to put away the tea things.

Marcella meanwhile had been sitting thoughtful.

"You say Westall makes bad blood with the young men, Mrs. Jellison?" she said, looking up. "Is there much poaching in this village now, do you think?"

There was a dead silence. Mrs. Hurd was at the other end of the cottage with her back to Marcella; at the question, her hands paused an instant in their work. The eyes of all the old people—of Patton and his wife, of Mrs. Jellison, and pretty Mrs. Brunt—were fixed on the speaker, but nobody said a word, not even Mrs. Jellison. Marcella coloured.

"Oh, you needn't suppose—" she said, throwing her beautiful head back, "you needn't suppose that I care about the game, or that I would ever be mean enough to tell anything that was told me. I know it does cause a great deal of quarrelling and bad blood. I believe it does here—and I should like to know more about it. I want to make up my mind what to think. Of course, my father has got his land and his own opinions. And Lord Maxwell has too. But I am not bound to think like either of them—I should like you to understand that. It seems to me right about all such things that people should enquire and find out for themselves."

Still silence. Mrs. Jellison's mouth twitched, and she threw a sly provocative glance at old Patton, as though she would have liked to poke him in the ribs. But she was not going to help him out; and at last the one male in the company found himself obliged to clear his throat for reply.

"We're old folks, most on us, miss, 'cept Mrs. Hurd. We don't hear talk o' things now like as we did when we were younger. If you ast Mr. Harden he'll tell you, I dessay."

Patton allowed himself an inward chuckle. Even Mrs. Jellison, he thought, must admit that he knew a thing or two as to the best way of dealing with the gentry.

But Marcella fixed him with her bright frank eyes.

"I had rather ask in the village," she said. "If you don't know how it is now, Mr. Patton, tell me how it used to be when you were young. Was the preserving very strict about here? Were there often fights, with the keepers—long ago?—in my grandfather's days?—and do you think men poached because they were hungry, or because they wanted sport?"

Patton looked at her fixedly a moment undecided, then her strong nervous youth seemed to exercise a kind of compulsion on him; perhaps, too, the pretty courtesy of her manner. He cleared his throat again, and tried to forget Mrs. Jellison, who would be sure to let him hear of it again, whatever he said.

"Well, I can't answer for 'em, miss, I'm sure, but if you ast me, I b'lieve ther's a bit o' boath in it. Yer see it's not in human natur, when a man's young and 's got his blood up, as he shouldn't want ter have 'is sport with the wild creeturs. Perhaps he see 'em when ee's going to the wood with a wood cart—or he cooms across 'em in the turnips—wounded birds, you understan', miss, perhaps the day after the gentry 'as been bangin' at 'em all day. An' ee don't see, not for the life of 'im, why ee shouldn't have 'em. Ther's bin lots an' lots for the rich folks, an' he don't see why ee shouldn't have a few arter they've enjoyed theirselves. And mebbe he's eleven shillin' a week—an' two-threy little chillen—you understan', miss?"

"Of course I understand!" said Marcella, eagerly, her dark cheek flushing. "Of course I do! But there's a good deal of game given away in these parts, isn't there? I know Lord Maxwell does, and they say Lord Winterbourne gives all his labourers rabbits, almost as many as they want."

Her questions wound old Patton up as though he had been a disused clock. He began to feel a whirr among his creaking wheels, a shaking of all his rusty mind.

"Perhaps they do, miss," he said, and his wife saw that he was beginning to tremble. "I dessay they do—I don't say nothink agen it—though theer's none of it cooms my way. But that isn't all the rights on it nayther—no, that it ain't. The labourin' man ee's glad enough to get a hare or a rabbit for 'is eatin'—but there's more in it nor that, miss. Ee's allus in the fields, that's where it is—ee can't help seein' the hares and the rabbits a-comin' in and out o' the woods, if it were iver so. Ee knows ivery run ov ivery one on 'em; if a hare's started furthest corner o' t' field, he can tell yer whar she'll git in by, because he's allus there, you see, miss, an' it's the only thing he's got to take his mind off like. And then he sets a snare or two—an' ee gits very sharp at settin' on 'em—an' ee'll go out nights for the sport of it. Ther isn't many things ee's got to liven him up; an' ee takes 'is chances o' goin' to jail—it's wuth it, ee thinks."

The old man's hands on his stick shook more and more visibly. Bygones of his youth had come back to him.

"Oh, I know! I know!" cried Marcella, with an accent half of indignation, half of despair. "It's the whole wretched system. It spoils those who've got, and those who haven't got. And there'll be no mending it till the people get the land back again, and till the rights on it are common to all."

"My! she do speak up, don't she?" said Mrs. Jellison, grinning again at her companions. Then, stooping forward with one of her wild movements, she caught Marcella's arm—"I'd like to hear yer tell that to Lord Maxwell, miss. I likes a roompus, I do."

Marcella flushed and laughed.

"I wouldn't mind saying that or anything else to Lord Maxwell," she said proudly. "I'm not ashamed of anything I think."

"No, I'll bet you ain't," said Mrs. Jellison, withdrawing her hand. "Now then, Patton, you say what you thinks. You ain't got no vote now you're in the parish houses—I minds that. The quality don't trouble you at 'lection times. This yoong man, Muster Wharton, as is goin' round so free, promisin' yer the sun out o' the sky, iv yer'll only vote for 'im, so th' men say—ee don't coom an' set down along o' you an' me, an' cocker of us up as ee do Joe Simmons or Jim Hurd here. But that don't matter. Yur thinkin's yur own, anyway."

But she nudged him in vain. Patton had suddenly run down, and there was no more to be got out of him.

Not only had nerves and speech failed him as they were wont, but in his cloudy soul there had risen, even while Marcella was speaking, the inevitable suspicion which dogs the relations of the poor towards the richer class. This young lady, with her strange talk, was the new squire's daughter. And the village had already made up its mind that Richard Boyce was "a poor sort," and "a hard sort" too, in his landlord capacity. He wasn't going to be any improvement on his brother—not a haporth! What was the good of this young woman talking, as she did, when there were three summonses as he, Patton, heard tell, just taken out by the sanitary inspector against Mr. Boyce for bad cottages? And not a farthing given away in the village neither, except perhaps the bits of food that the young lady herself brought down to the village now and then, for which no one, in truth, felt any cause to be particularly grateful. Besides, what did she mean by asking questions about the poaching? Old Patton knew as well as anybody else in the village, that during Robert Boyce's last days, and after the death of his sportsman son, the Mellor estate had become the haunt of poachers from far and near, and that the trouble had long since spread into the neighbouring properties, so that the Winterbourne and Maxwell keepers regarded it their most arduous business to keep watch on the men of Mellor. Of course the young woman knew it all, and she and her father wanted to know more. That was why she talked. Patton hardened himself against the creeping ways of the quality.

"I don't think nought," he said roughly in answer to Mrs. Jellison. "Thinkin' won't come atwixt me and the parish coffin when I'm took. I've no call to think, I tell yer."

Marcella's chest heaved with indignant feeling.

"Oh, but, Mr. Patton!" she cried, leaning forward to him, "won't it comfort you a bit, even if you can't live to see it, to think there's a better time coming? There must be. People can't go on like this always—hating each other and trampling on each other. They're beginning to see it now, they are! When I was living in London, the persons I was with talked and thought of it all day. Some day, whenever the people choose—for they've got the power now they've got the vote—there'll be land for everybody, and in every village there'll be a council to manage things, and the labourer will count for just as much as the squire and the parson, and he'll be better educated and better fed, and care for many things he doesn't care for now. But all the same, if he wants sport and shooting, it will be there for him to get. For everybody will have a chance and a turn, and there'll be no bitterness between classes, and no hopeless pining and misery as there is now!"

The girl broke off, catching her breath. It excited her to say these things to these people, to these poor tottering old things who had lived out their lives to the end under the pressure of an iron system, and had no lien on the future, whatever Paradise it might bring. Again the situation had something foreseen and dramatic in it. She saw herself, as the preacher, sitting on her stool beside the poor grate—she realised as a spectator the figures of the women and the old man played on by the firelight—the white, bare, damp-stained walls of the cottage, and in the background the fragile though still comely form of Minta Hurd, who was standing with her back to the dresser, and her head bent forward, listening to the talk while her fingers twisted the straw she plaited eternally from morning till night, for a wage of about 1s. 3d. a week:

Her mind was all aflame with excitement and defiance—defiance of her father, Lord Maxwell, Aldous Raeburn. Let him come, her friend, and see for himself what she thought it right to do and say in this miserable village. Her soul challenged him, longed to provoke him! Well, she was soon to meet him, and in a new and more significant relation and environment. The fact made her perception of the whole situation the more rich and vibrant.

Patton, while these broken thoughts and sensations were coursing through Marcella's head, was slowly revolving what she had been saying, and the others were waiting for him.

At last he rolled his tongue round his dry lips and delivered himself by a final effort.

"Them as likes, miss, may believe as how things are going to happen that way, but yer won't ketch me! Them as have got 'ull keep"—he let his stick sharply down on the floor—"an' them as 'aven't got 'ull 'ave to go without and lump it—as long as you're alive, miss, you mark my words!"

"Oh, Lor', you wor allus one for makin' a poor mouth, Patton!" said Mrs. Jellison. She had been sitting with her arms folded across her chest, part absent, part amused, part malicious. "The young lady speaks beautiful, just like a book she do. An' she's likely to know a deal better nor poor persons like you and me. All I kin say is,—if there's goin' to be dividin' up of other folks' property, when I'm gone, I hope George Westall won't get nothink ov it! He's bad enough as 'tis. Isabella 'ud have a fine time if ee took to drivin' ov his carriage."

The others laughed out, Marcella at their head, and Mrs. Jellison subsided, the corners of her mouth still twitching, and her eyes shining as though a host of entertaining notions were trooping through her—which, however, she preferred to amuse herself with rather than the public. Marcella looked at Patton thoughtfully.

"You've been all your life in this village, haven't you, Mr. Patton?" she asked him.

"Born top o' Witchett's Hill, miss. An' my wife here, she wor born just a house or two further along, an' we two bin married sixty-one year come next March."

He had resumed his usual almshouse tone, civil and a little plaintive. His wife behind him smiled gently at being spoken of. She had a long fair face, and white hair surmounted by a battered black bonnet, a mouth set rather on one side, and a more observant and refined air than most of her neighbours. She sighed while she talked, and spoke in a delicate quaver.

"D'ye know, miss," said Mrs. Jellison, pointing to Mrs. Patton, "as she kep' school when she was young?"

"Did you, Mrs. Patton?" asked Marcella in her tone of sympathetic interest. "The school wasn't very big then, I suppose?"

"About forty, miss," said Mrs. Patton, with a sigh. "There was eighteen the Rector paid for, and eighteen Mr. Boyce paid for, and the rest paid for themselves."

Her voice dropped gently, and she sighed again like one weighted with an eternal fatigue.

"And what did you teach them?"

"Well, I taught them the plaitin', miss, and as much readin' and writin' as I knew myself. It wasn't as high as it is now, you see, miss," and a delicate flush dawned on the old cheek as Mrs. Patton threw a glance round her companions as though appealing to them not to tell stories of her.

But Mrs. Jellison was implacable. "It wor she taught me," she said, nodding at Marcella and pointing sideways to Mrs. Patton. "She had a queer way wi' the hard words, I can tell yer, miss. When she couldn't tell 'em herself she'd never own up to it. 'Say Jerusalem, my dear, and pass on.' That's what she'd say, she would, sure's as you're alive! I've heard her do it times. An' when Isabella an' me used to read the Bible, nights, I'd allus rayther do 't than be beholden to me own darter. It gets yer through, anyway."

"Well, it wor a good word," said Mrs. Patton, blushing and mildly defending herself. "It didn't do none of yer any harm."

"Oh, an' before her, miss, I went to a school to another woman, as lived up Shepherd's Row. You remember her, Betsy Brunt?"

Mrs. Brunt's worn eyes began already to gleam and sparkle.

"Yis, I recolleck very well, Mrs. Jellison. She wor Mercy Moss, an' a goodish deal of trouble you'd use to get me into wi' Mercy Moss, all along o' your tricks."

Mrs. Jellison, still with folded arms, began to rock herself gently up and down as though to stimulate memory.

"My word, but Muster Maurice—he wor the clergyman here then, miss—wor set on Mercy Moss. He and his wife they flattered and cockered her up. Ther wor nobody like her for keepin' school, not in their eyes—till one midsummer—she—well she—I don't want to say nothink onpleasant—but she transgressed," said Mrs. Jellison, nodding mysteriously, triumphant however in the unimpeachable delicacy of her language, and looking round the circle for approval.

"What do you say?" asked Marcella, innocently. "What did Mercy Moss do?"

Mrs. Jellison's eyes danced with malice and mischief, but her mouth shut like a vice. Patton leaned forward on his stick, shaken with a sort of inward explosion; his plaintive wife laughed under her breath till she must needs sigh because laughter tired her old bones. Mrs. Brunt gurgled gently. And finally Mrs. Jellison was carried away.

"Oh, my goodness me, don't you make me tell tales o' Mercy Moss!" she said at last, dashing the water out of her eyes with an excited tremulous hand. "She's bin dead and gone these forty year—married and buried mos' respeckable—it 'ud be a burning shame to bring up tales agen her now. Them as tittle-tattles about dead folks needn't look to lie quiet theirselves in their graves. I've said it times, and I'll say it again. What are you lookin' at me for, Betsy Brunt?"

And Mrs. Jellison drew up suddenly with a fierce glance at Mrs. Brunt.

"Why, Mrs. Jellison, I niver meant no offence," said Mrs. Brunt, hastily.

"I won't stand no insinooating," said Mrs. Jellison, with energy. "If you've got soomthink agen me, you may out wi' 't an' niver mind the young lady."

But Mrs. Brunt, much flurried, retreated amid a shower of excuses, pursued by her enemy, who was soon worrying the whole little company, as a dog worries a flock of sheep, snapping here and teasing there, chattering at the top of her voice in broad dialect, as she got more and more excited, and quite as ready to break her wit on Marcella as on anybody else. As for the others, most of them had known little else for weeks than alternations of toil and sickness; they were as much amused and excited to-night by Mrs. Jellison's audacities as a Londoner is by his favourite low comedian at his favourite music-hall. They played chorus to her, laughed, baited her; even old Patton was drawn against his will into a caustic sociability.

Marcella meanwhile sat on her stool, her chin upon her hand, and her full glowing eyes turned upon the little spectacle, absorbing it all with a covetous curiosity.

The light-heartedness, the power of enjoyment left in these old folk struck her dumb. Mrs. Brunt had an income of two-and-sixpence a week, plus two loaves from the parish, and one of the parish or "charity" houses, a hovel, that is to say, of one room, scarcely fit for human habitation at all. She had lost five children, was allowed two shillings a week by two labourer sons, and earned sixpence a week—about—by continuous work at "the plait." Her husband had been run over by a farm cart and killed; up to the time of his death his earnings averaged about twenty-eight pounds a year. Much the same with the Pattons. They had lost eight children out of ten, and were now mainly supported by the wages of a daughter in service. Mrs. Patton had of late years suffered agonies and humiliations indescribable, from a terrible illness which the parish doctor was quite incompetent to treat, being all through a singularly sensitive woman, with a natural instinct for the decorous and the beautiful.

Amazing! Starvation wages; hardships of sickness and pain; horrors of birth and horrors of death; wholesale losses of kindred and friends; the meanest surroundings; the most sordid cares—of this mingled cup of village fate every person in the room had drunk, and drunk deep. Yet here in this autumn twilight, they laughed and chattered, and joked—weird, wrinkled children, enjoying an hour's rough play in a clearing of the storm! Dependent from birth to death on squire, parson, parish, crushed often, and ill-treated, according to their own ideas, but bearing so little ill-will; amusing themselves with their own tragedies even, if they could but sit by a fire and drink a neighbour's cup of tea.

Her heart swelled and burned within her. Yes, the old people were past hoping for; mere wreck and driftwood on the shore, the spring-tide of death would soon have swept them all into unremembered graves. But the young men and women, the children, were they too to grow up, and grow old like these—the same smiling, stunted, ignobly submissive creatures? One woman at least would do her best with her one poor life to rouse some of them to discontent and revolt!

CHAPTER IX.

The fire sank, and Mrs. Hurd made no haste to light her lamp. Soon the old people were dim chattering shapes in a red darkness. Mrs. Hurd still plaited, silent and upright, lifting her head every now and then at each sound upon the road.

At last there was a knock at the door. Mrs. Hurd ran to open it.

"Mother, I'm going your way," said a strident voice. "I'll help you home if you've a mind."

On the threshold stood Mrs. Jellison's daughter, Mrs. Westall, with her little boy beside her, the woman's broad shoulders and harsh striking head standing out against the pale sky behind. Marcella noticed that she greeted none of the old people, nor they her. And as for Mrs. Hurd, as soon as she saw the keeper's wife, she turned her back abruptly on her visitor, and walked to the other end of the kitchen.

"Are you comin', mother?" repeated Isabella.

Mrs. Jellison grumbled, gibed at her, and made long leave-takings, while the daughter stood silent, waiting, and every now and then peering at Marcella, who had never seen her before.

"I don' know where yur manners is," said Mrs. Jellison sharply to her, as though she had been a child of ten, "that you don't say good evenin' to the young lady."

Mrs. Westall curtsied low, and hoped she might be excused, as it had grown so dark. Her tone was smooth and servile, and Marcella disliked her as she shook hands with her.

The other old people, including Mrs. Brunt, departed a minute or two after the mother and daughter, and Marcella was left an instant with Mrs. Hurd.

"Oh, thank you, thank you kindly, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, raising her apron to her eyes to staunch some irrepressible tears, as Marcella showed her the advertisement which it might possibly be worth Hurd's while to answer. "He'll try, you may be sure. But I can't think as how anythink 'ull come ov it."

And then suddenly, as though something unexplained had upset her self-control, the poor patient creature utterly broke down. Leaning against the bare shelves which held their few pots and pans, she threw her apron over her head and burst into the forlornest weeping. "I wish I was dead; I wish I was dead, an' the chillen too!"

Marcella hung over her, one flame of passionate pity, comforting, soothing, promising help. Mrs. Hurd presently recovered enough to tell her that Hurd had gone off that morning before it was light to a farm near Thame, where it had been told him he might possibly find a job.

"But he'll not find it, miss, he'll not find it," she said, twisting her hands in a sort of restless misery; "there's nothing good happens to such as us. An' he wor allus a one to work if he could get it."

There was a sound outside. Mrs. Hurd flew to the door, and a short, deformed man, with a large head and red hair, stumbled in blindly, splashed with mud up to his waist, and evidently spent with long walking.

He stopped on the threshold, straining his eyes to see through the fire-lit gloom.

"It's Miss Boyce, Jim," said his wife. "Did you hear of anythink?"

"They're turnin' off hands instead of takin' ov 'em on," he said briefly, and fell into a chair by the grate.

He had hardly greeted Marcella, who had certainly looked to be greeted. Ever since her arrival in August, as she had told Aldous Raeburn, she had taken a warm interest in this man and his family. There was something about them which marked them out a bit from their fellows—whether it was the husband's strange but not repulsive deformity, contrasted with the touch of plaintive grace in the wife, or the charm of the elfish children, with their tiny stick-like arms and legs, and the glancing wildness of their blue eyes, under the frizzle of red hair, which shone round their little sickly faces. Very soon she had begun to haunt them in her eager way, to try and penetrate their peasant lives, which were so full of enigma and attraction to her, mainly because of their very defectiveness, their closeness to an animal simplicity, never to be reached by any one of her sort. She soon discovered or imagined that Hurd had more education than his neighbours. At any rate, he would sit listening to her—and smoking, as she made him do—while she talked politics and socialism to him; and though he said little in return, she made the most of it, and was sure anyway that he was glad to see her come in, and must some time read the labour newspapers and Venturist leaflets she brought him, for they were always well thumbed before they came back to her.

But to-night his sullen weariness would make no effort, and the hunted restless glances he threw from side to side as he sat crouching over the fire—the large mouth tight shut, the nostrils working—showed her that he would be glad when she went away.

Her young exacting temper was piqued. She had been for some time trying to arrange their lives for them. So, in spite of his dumb resistance, she lingered on, questioning and suggesting. As to the advertisement she had brought down, he put it aside almost without looking at it. "There ud be a hun'erd men after it before ever he could get there," was all he would say to it. Then she inquired if he had been to ask the steward of the Maxwell Court estate for work. He did not answer, but Mrs. Hurd said timidly that she heard tell a new drive was to be made that winter for the sake of giving employment. But their own men on the estate would come first, and there were plenty of them out of work.

"Well, but there is the game," persisted Marcella. "Isn't it possible they might want some extra men now the pheasant shooting has begun. I might go and inquire of Westall—I know him a little."

The wife made a startled movement, and Hurd raised his misshapen form with a jerk.

"Thank yer, miss, but I'll not trouble yer. I don't want nothing to do with Westall."

And taking up a bit of half-burnt wood which lay on the hearth, he threw it violently back into the grate. Marcella looked from one to the other with surprise. Mrs. Hurd's expression was one of miserable discomfort, and she kept twisting her apron in her gnarled hands.

"Yes, I shall tell, Jim!" she broke out. "I shall. I know Miss Boyce is one as ull understand—"

Hurd turned round and looked at his wife full. But she persisted.

"You see, miss, they don't speak, don't Jim and George Westall. When Jim was quite a lad he was employed at Mellor, under old Westall, George's father as was. Jim was 'watcher,' and young George he was assistant. That was in Mr. Robert's days, you understand, miss—when Master Harold was alive; and they took a deal o' trouble about the game. An' George Westall, he was allays leading the others a life—tale-bearing an' spyin', an' settin' his father against any of 'em as didn't give in to him. An', oh, he behaved fearful to Jim! Jim ull tell you. Now, Jim, what's wrong with you—why shouldn't I tell?"

For Hurd had risen, and as he and his wife looked at each other a sort of mute conversation seemed to pass between them. Then he turned angrily, and went out of the cottage by the back door into the garden.

The wife sat in some agitation a moment, then she resumed. "He can't bear no talk about Westall—it seems to drive him silly. But I say as how people should know."

Her wavering eye seemed to interrogate her companion. Marcella was puzzled by her manner—it was so far from simple.

"But that was long ago, surely," she said.

"Yes, it wor long ago, but you don't forget them things, miss! An' Westall, he's just the same sort as he was then, so folks say," she added hurriedly. "You see Jim, miss, how he's made? His back was twisted that way when he was a little un. His father was a good old man—everybody spoke well of 'im—but his mother, she was a queer mad body, with red hair, just like Jim and the children, and a temper! my word. They do say she was an Irish girl, out of a gang as used to work near here—an' she let him drop one day when she was in liquor, an' never took no trouble about him afterwards. He was a poor sickly lad, he was! you'd wonder how he grew up at all. And oh! George Westall he treated him cruel. He'd kick and swear at him; then he'd dare him to fight, an' thrash him till the others came in, an' got him away. Then he'd carry tales to his father, and one day old Westall beat Jim within an inch of 'is life, with a strap end, because of a lie George told 'im. The poor chap lay in a ditch under Disley Wood all day, because he was that knocked about he couldn't walk, and at night he crawled home on his hands and knees. He's shown me the place many a time! Then he told his father, and next morning he told me, as he couldn't stand it no longer, an' he never went back no more."

"And he told no one else?—he never complained?" asked Marcella, indignantly.

"What ud ha been the good o' that, miss?" Mrs. Hurd said, wondering. "Nobody ud ha taken his word agen old Westall's. But he come and told me. I was housemaid at Lady Leven's then, an' he and his father were old friends of ourn. And I knew George Westall too. He used to walk out with me of a Sunday, just as civil as could be, and give my mother rabbits now and again, and do anything I'd ask him. An' I up and told him he was a brute to go ill-treatin' a sickly fellow as couldn't pay him back. That made him as cross as vinegar, an' when Jim began to be about with me ov a Sunday sometimes, instead of him, he got madder and madder. An' Jim asked me to marry him—he begged of me—an' I didn't know what to say. For Westall had asked me twice; an' I was afeard of Jim's health, an' the low wages he'd get, an' of not bein' strong myself. But one day I was going up a lane into Tudley End woods, an' I heard George Westall on tother side of the hedge with a young dog he was training. Somethin' crossed him, an' he flew into a passion with it. It turned me sick. I ran away and I took against him there and then. I was frightened of him. I duresn't trust myself, and I said to Jim I'd take him. So you can understan', miss, can't you, as Jim don't want to have nothing to do with Westall? Thank you kindly, all the same," she added, breaking off her narrative with the same uncertainty of manner, the same timid scrutiny of her visitor that Marcella had noticed before.

Marcella replied that she could certainly understand.

"But I suppose they've not got in each other's way of late years," she said as she rose to go.

"Oh! no, miss, no," said Mrs. Hurd as she went hurriedly to fetch a fur tippet which her visitor had laid down on the dresser.

"There is one person I can speak to," said Marcella, as she put on the wrap. "And I will." Against her will she reddened a little; but she had not been able to help throwing out the promise. "And now, you won't despair, will you? You'll trust me? I could always do something."

She took Mrs. Hurd's hand with a sweet look and gesture. Standing there in her tall vigorous youth, her furs wrapped about her, she had the air of protecting and guiding this poverty that could not help itself. The mother and wife felt herself shy, intimidated. The tears came back to her brown eyes.

* * * * *

When Miss Boyce had gone, Minta Hurd went to the fire and put it together, sighing all the time, her face still red and miserable.

The door opened and her husband came in. He carried some potatoes in his great earth-stained hands.

"You're goin' to put that bit of hare on? Well, mak' eëaste, do, for I'm starvin'. What did she want to stay all that time for? You go and get it. I'll blow the fire up—damn these sticks!—they're as wet as Dugnall pond."

Nevertheless, as she sadly came and went, preparing the supper, she saw that he was appeased, in a better temper than before.

"What did you tell 'er?" he asked abruptly.

"What do you spose I'd tell her? I acted for the best. I'm always thinkin' for you!" she said as though with a little cry, "or we'd soon be in trouble—worse trouble than we are!" she added miserably.

He stopped working the old bellows for a moment, and, holding his long chin, stared into the flames. With his deformity, his earth-stains, his blue eyes, his brown wrinkled skin, and his shock of red hair, he had the look of some strange gnome crouching there.

"I don't know what you're at, I'll swear," he said after a pause. "I ain't in any pertickler trouble just now—if yer wouldn't send a fellow stumpin' the country for nothink. If you'll just let me alone I'll get a livin' for you and the chillen right enough. Don't you trouble yourself—an' hold your tongue!"

She threw down her apron with a gesture of despair as she stood beside him, in front of the fire, watching the pan.

"What am I to do, Jim, an' them chillen—when you're took to prison?" she asked him vehemently.

"I shan't get took to prison, I tell yer. All the same, Westall got holt o' me this mornin'. I thought praps you'd better know."

Her exclamation of terror, her wild look at him, were exactly what he had expected; nevertheless, he flinched before them. His brutality was mostly assumed. He had adopted it as a mask for more than a year past, because he must go his way, and she worried him.

"Now look here," he said resolutely, "it don't matter. I'm not goin' to be took by Westall. I'd kill him or myself first. But he caught me lookin' at a snare this mornin'—it wor misty, and I didn't see no one comin'. It wor close to the footpath, and it worn't my snare."

"'Jim, my chap,' says he, mockin', 'I'm sorry for it, but I'm going to search yer, so take it quietly,' says he. He had young Dynes with him—so I didn't say nought—I kep' as still as a mouse, an' sure enough he put his ugly han's into all my pockets. An' what do yer think he foun'?"

"What?" she said breathlessly.

"Nothink!" he laughed out. "Nary an end o' string, nor a kink o' wire—nothink. I'd hidden the two rabbits I got las' night, and all my bits o' things in a ditch far enough out o' his way. I just laughed at the look ov 'im. 'I'll have the law on yer for assault an' battery, yer damned miscalculatin' brute!' says I to him—'why don't yer get that boy there to teach yer your business?' An' off I walked. Don't you be afeared—'ee'll never lay hands on me!"

But Minta was sore afraid, and went on talking and lamenting while she made the tea. He took little heed of her. He sat by the fire quivering and thinking. In a public-house two nights before this one, overtures had been made to him on behalf of a well-known gang of poachers with head-quarters in a neighbouring county town, who had their eyes on the pheasant preserves in Westall's particular beat—the Tudley End beat—and wanted a local watcher and accomplice. He had thought the matter at first too dangerous to touch. Moreover, he was at that moment in a period of transition, pestered by Minta to give up "the poachin'," and yet drawn back to it after his spring and summer of field work by instincts only recently revived, after long dormancy, but now hard to resist.

Presently he turned with anger upon one of Minta's wails which happened to reach him.

"Look 'ere!" said he to her, "where ud you an' the chillen be this night if I 'adn't done it? 'Adn't we got rid of every stick o' stuff we iver 'ad? 'Ere's a well-furnished place for a chap to sit in!"—he glanced bitterly round the bare kitchen, which had none of the little properties of the country poor, no chest, no set of mahogany drawers, no comfortable chair, nothing, but the dresser and the few rush chairs and the table, and a few odds and ends of crockery and household stuff—"wouldn't we all a bin on the parish, if we 'adn't starved fust—wouldn't we?—jes' answer me that! Didn't we sit here an' starve, till the bones was comin' through the chillen's skin?—didn't we?"

That he could still argue the point with her showed the inner vulnerableness, the inner need of her affection and of peace with her, which he still felt, far as certain new habits were beginning to sweep him from her.

"It's Westall or Jenkins (Jenkins was the village policeman) havin' the law on yer, Jim," she said with emphasis, putting down a cup and looking at him—it's the thought of that makes me cold in my back. None o' my people was ever in prison—an' if it 'appened to you I should just die of shame!"

"Then yer'd better take and read them papers there as she brought," he said impatiently, first jerking his finger over his shoulder in the direction of Mellor to indicate Miss Boyce, and then pointing to a heap of newspapers which lay on the floor in a corner, "they'd tell yer summat about the shame o' makin' them game-laws—not o' breakin' ov 'em. But I'm sick o' this! Where's them chillen? Why do yer let that boy out so late?"

And opening the door he stood on the threshold looking up and down the village street, while Minta once more gave up the struggle, dried her eyes, and told herself to be cheerful. But it was hard. She was far better born and better educated than her husband. Her father had been a small master chair-maker in Wycombe, and her mother, a lackadaisical silly woman, had given her her "fine" name by way of additional proof that she and her children were something out of the common. Moreover, she had the conforming law-abiding instincts of the well-treated domestic servant, who has lived on kindly terms with the gentry and shared their standards. And for years after their marriage Hurd had allowed her to govern him. He had been so patient, so hard-working, such a kind husband and father, so full of a dumb wish to show her he was grateful to her for marrying such a fellow as he. The quarrel with Westall seemed to have sunk out of his mind. He never spoke to or of him. Low wages, the burden of quick-coming children, the bad sanitary conditions of their wretched cottage, and poor health, had made their lives one long and sordid struggle. But for years he had borne his load with extraordinary patience. He and his could just exist, and the man who had been in youth the lonely victim of his neighbours' scorn had found a woman to give him all herself and children to love. Hence years of submission, a hidden flowering time for both of them.

Till that last awful winter!—the winter before Richard Boyce's succession to Mellor—when the farmers had been mostly ruined, and half the able-bodied men of Mellor had tramped "up into the smoke," as the village put it, in search of London work—then, out of actual sheer starvation—that very rare excuse of the poacher!—Hurd had gone one night and snared a hare on the Mellor land. Would the wife and mother ever forget the pure animal satisfaction of that meal, or the fearful joy of the next night, when he got three shillings from a local publican for a hare and two rabbits?

But after the first relief Minta had gone in fear and trembling. For the old woodcraft revived in Hurd, and the old passion for the fields and their chances which he had felt as a lad before his "watcher's" place had been made intolerable to him by George Westall's bullying. He became excited, unmanageable. Very soon he was no longer content with Mellor, where, since the death of young Harold, the heir, the keepers had been dismissed, and what remained of a once numerous head of game lay open to the wiles of all the bold spirits of the neighbourhood. He must needs go on to those woods of Lord Maxwell's, which girdled the Mellor estate on three sides. And here he came once more across his enemy. For George Westall was now in the far better-paid service of the Court—and a very clever keeper, with designs on the head keeper's post whenever it might be vacant. In the case of a poacher he had the scent of one of his own hares. It was known to him in an incredibly short time that that "low caselty fellow Hurd" was attacking "his" game.

Hurd, notwithstanding, was cunning itself, and Westall lay in wait for him in vain. Meanwhile, all the old hatred between the two men revived. Hurd drank this winter more than he had ever drunk yet. It was necessary to keep on good terms with one or two publicans who acted as "receivers" of the poached game of the neighbourhood. And it seemed to him that Westall pursued him into these low dens. The keeper—big, burly, prosperous—would speak to him with insolent patronage, watching him all the time, or with the old brutality, which Hurd dared not resent. Only in his excitable dwarf's sense hate grew and throve, very soon to monstrous proportions. Westall's menacing figure darkened all his sky for him. His poaching, besides a means of livelihood, became more and more a silent duel between him and his boyhood's tyrant.

And now, after seven months of regular field-work and respectable living, it was all to begin again with the new winter! The same shudders and terrors, the same shames before the gentry and Mr. Harden!—the soft, timid woman with her conscience could not endure the prospect. For some weeks after the harvest was over she struggled. He had begun to go out again at nights. But she drove him to look for employment, and lived in tears when he failed.

As for him, she knew that he was glad to fail; there was a certain ease and jauntiness in his air to-night as he stood calling the children:

"Will!—you come in at once! Daisy!—Nellie!"

Two little figures came pattering up the street in the moist October dusk, a third, panted behind. The girls ran in to their mother chattering and laughing. Hurd lifted the boy in his arm.

"Where you bin, Will? What were yo out for in this nasty damp? I've brought yo a whole pocket full o' chestnuts, and summat else too."

He carried him in to the fire and sat him on his knees. The little emaciated creature, flushed with the pleasure of his father's company, played contentedly in the intervals of coughing with the shining chestnuts, or ate his slice of the fine pear—the gift of a friend in Thame—which proved to be the "summat else" of promise. The curtains were close-drawn; the paraffin lamp flared on the table, and as the savoury smell of the hare and onions on the fire filled the kitchen, the whole family gathered round watching for the moment of eating. The fire played on the thin legs and pinched faces of the children; on the baby's cradle in the further corner; on the mother, red-eyed still, but able to smile and talk again; on the strange Celtic face and matted hair of the dwarf. Family affection—and the satisfaction of the simpler physical needs—these things make the happiness of the poor. For this hour, to-night, the Hurds were happy.

Meanwhile, in the lane outside, Marcella, as she walked home, passed a tall broad-shouldered man in a velveteen suit and gaiters, his gun over his shoulder and two dogs behind him, his pockets bulging on either side. He walked with a kind of military air, and touched his cap to her as he passed.

Marcella barely nodded.

"Tyrant and bully!" she thought to herself with Mrs. Hurd's story in her mind. "Yet no doubt he is a valuable keeper; Lord Maxwell would be sorry to lose him! It is the system makes such men—and must have them."

The clatter of a pony carriage disturbed her thoughts. A small, elderly lady, in a very large mushroom hat, drove past her in the dusk and bowed stiffly. Marcella was so taken by surprise that she barely returned the bow. Then she looked after the carriage. That was Miss Raeburn.

To-morrow!

CHAPTER X.

"Won't you sit nearer to the window? We are rather proud of our view at this time of year," said Miss Raeburn to Marcella, taking her visitor's jacket from her as she spoke, and laying it aside. "Lady Winterbourne is late, but she will come, I am sure. She is very precise about engagements."

Marcella moved her chair nearer to the great bow-window, and looked out over the sloping gardens of the Court, and the autumn splendour of the woods girdling them in on all sides. She held her head nervously erect, was not apparently much inclined to talk, and Miss Raeburn, who had resumed her knitting within a few paces of her guest, said to herself presently after a few minutes' conversation on the weather and the walk from Mellor: "Difficult—decidedly difficult—and too much manner for a young girl. But the most picturesque creature I ever set eyes on!"

Lord Maxwell's sister was an excellent woman, the inquisitive, benevolent despot of all the Maxwell villages; and one of the soundest Tories still left to a degenerate party and a changing time. Her brother and her great-nephew represented to her the flower of human kind; she had never been capable, and probably never would be capable, of quarrelling with either of them on any subject whatever. At the same time she had her rights with them. She was at any rate their natural guardian in those matters, relating to womankind, where men are confessedly given to folly. She had accordingly kept a shrewd eye in Aldous's interest on all the young ladies of the neighbourhood for many years past; knew perfectly well all that he might have done, and sighed over all that he had so far left undone.

At the present moment, in spite of the even good-breeding with which she knitted and chattered beside Marcella, she was in truth consumed with curiosity, conjecture, and alarm on the subject of this Miss Boyce. Profoundly as they trusted each other, the Raeburns were not on the surface a communicative family. Neither her brother nor Aldous had so far bestowed any direct confidence upon her; but the course of affairs had, notwithstanding, aroused her very keenest attention. In the first place, as we know, the mistress of Maxwell Court had left Mellor and its new occupants unvisited; she had plainly understood it to be her brother's wish that she should do so. How, indeed, could you know the women without knowing Richard Boyce? which, according to Lord Maxwell, was impossible. And now it was Lord Maxwell who had suggested not only that after all it would be kind to call upon the poor things, who were heavily weighted enough already with Dick Boyce for husband and father, but that it would be a graceful act on his sister's part to ask the girl and her mother to luncheon. Dick Boyce of course must be made to keep his distance, but the resources of civilisation were perhaps not unequal to the task of discriminating, if it were prudently set about. At any rate Miss Raeburn gathered that she was expected to try, and instead of pressing her brother for explanations she held her tongue, paid her call forthwith, and wrote her note.

But although Aldous, thinking no doubt that he had been already sufficiently premature, had said nothing at all as to his own feelings to his great-aunt, she knew perfectly well that he had said a great deal on the subject of Miss Boyce and her mother to Lady Winterbourne, the only woman in the neighbourhood with whom he was ever really confidential. No woman, of course, in Miss Raeburn's position, and with Miss Raeburn's general interest in her kind, could have been ignorant for any appreciable number of days after the Boyces' arrival at Mellor that they possessed a handsome daughter, of whom the Hardens in particular gave striking but, as Miss Raeburn privately thought, by no means wholly attractive accounts. And now, after all these somewhat agitating preliminaries, here was the girl established in the Court drawing-room, Aldous more nervous and preoccupied than she had ever seen him, and Lord Maxwell expressing a particular anxiety to return from his Board meeting in good time for luncheon, to which he had especially desired that Lady Winterbourne should be bidden, and no one else! It may well be supposed that Miss Raeburn was on the alert.

As for Marcella, she was on her side keenly conscious of being observed, of having her way to make. Here she was alone among these formidable people, whose acquaintance she had in a manner compelled. Well—what blame? What was to prevent her from doing the same thing again to-morrow? Her conscience was absolutely clear. If they were not ready to meet her in the same spirit in which through Mr. Raeburn she had approached them, she would know perfectly well how to protect herself—above all, how to live out her life in the future without troubling them.

Meanwhile, in spite of her dignity and those inward propitiations it from time to time demanded, she was, in her human vivid way, full of an excitement and curiosity she could hardly conceal as perfectly as she desired—curiosity as to the great house and the life in it, especially as to Aldous Raeburn's part therein. She knew very little indeed of the class to which by birth she belonged; great houses and great people were strange to her. She brought her artist's and student's eyes to look at them with; she was determined not to be dazzled or taken in by them. At the same time, as she glanced every now and then round the splendid room in which they sat, with its Tudor ceiling, its fine pictures, its combination of every luxury with every refinement, she was distinctly conscious of a certain thrill, a romantic drawing towards the stateliness and power which it all implied, together with a proud and careless sense of equality, of kinship so to speak, which she made light of, but would not in reality have been without for the world.

In birth and blood she had nothing to yield to the Raeburns—so her mother assured her. If things were to be vulgarly measured, this fact too must come in. But they should not be vulgarly measured. She did not believe in class or wealth—not at all. Only—as her mother had told her—she must hold her head up. An inward temper, which no doubt led to that excess of manner of which Miss Raeburn was meanwhile conscious.

Where were the gentlemen? Marcella was beginning to resent and tire of the innumerable questions as to her likes and dislikes, her accomplishments, her friends, her opinions of Mellor and the neighbourhood, which this knitting lady beside her poured out upon her so briskly, when to her great relief the door opened and a footman announced "Lady Winterbourne."

A very tall thin lady in black entered the room at the words. "My dear!" she said to Miss Raeburn, "I am very late, but the roads are abominable, and those horses Edward has just given me have to be taken such tiresome care of. I told the coachman next time he might wrap them in shawls and put them to bed, and I should walk."

"You are quite capable of it, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, kissing her.
"We know you! Miss Boyce—Lady Winterbourne."

Lady Winterbourne shook hands with a shy awkwardness which belied her height and stateliness. As she sat down beside Miss Raeburn the contrast between her and Lord Maxwell's sister was sufficiently striking. Miss Raeburn was short, inclined to be stout, and to a certain gay profusion in her attire. Her cap was made of a bright silk handkerchief edged with lace; round her neck were hung a number of small trinkets on various gold chains; she abounded too in bracelets, most of which were clearly old-fashioned mementos of departed relatives or friends. Her dress was a cheerful red verging on crimson; and her general air suggested energy, bustle, and a good-humoured common sense.

Lady Winterbourne, on the other hand, was not only dressed from head to foot in severe black without an ornament; her head and face belonged also to the same impression, as of some strong and forcible study in black and white. The attitude was rigidly erect; the very dark eyes, under the snowy and abundant hair, had a trick of absent staring; in certain aspects the whole figure had a tragic, nay, formidable dignity, from which one expected, and sometimes got, the tone and gesture of tragic acting. Yet at the same time, mixed in therewith, a curious strain of womanish, nay childish, weakness, appealingness. Altogether, a great lady, and a personality—yet something else too—something ill-assured, timid, incongruous—hard to be defined.

"I believe you have not been at Mellor long?" the new-comer asked, in a deep contralto voice which she dragged a little.

"About seven weeks. My father and mother have been there since May."

"You must of course think it a very interesting old place?"

"Of course I do; I love it," said Marcella, disconcerted by the odd habit Lady Winterbourne had of fixing her eyes upon a person, and then, as it were, forgetting what she had done with them.

"Oh, I haven't been there, Agneta," said the new-comer, turning after a pause to Miss Raeburn, "since that summer—you remember that party when the Palmerstons came over—so long ago—twenty years!"

Marcella sat stiffly upright. Lady Winterbourne grew a little nervous and flurried.

"I don't think I ever saw your mother, Miss Boyce—I was much away from home about then. Oh, yes, I did once—"

The speaker stopped, a sudden red suffusing her pale cheeks. She had felt certain somehow, at sight of Marcella, that she should say or do something untoward, and she had promptly justified her own prevision. The only time she had ever seen Mrs. Boyce had been in court, on the last day of the famous trial in which Richard Boyce was concerned, when she had made out the wife sitting closely veiled as near to her husband as possible, waiting for the verdict. As she had already confided this reminiscence to Miss Raeburn, and had forgotten she had done so, both ladies had a moment of embarrassment.

"Mrs. Boyce, I am sorry to say, does not seem to be strong," said Miss Raeburn, bending over the heel of her stocking. "I wish we could have had the pleasure of seeing her to-day."

There was a pause. Lady Winterbourne's tragic eyes were once more considering Marcella.

"I hope you will come and see me," she said at last abruptly—"and Mrs.
Boyce too."

The voice was very soft and refined though so deep, and Marcella looking up was suddenly magnetised.

"Yes, I will," she said, all her face melting into sensitive life.
"Mamma won't go anywhere, but I will come, if you will ask me."

"Will you come next Tuesday?" said Lady Winterbourne quickly—"come to tea, and I will drive you back. Mr. Raeburn told me about you. He says—you read a great deal."

The solemnity of the last words, the fixedness of the tragic look, were not to be resisted. Marcella laughed out, and both ladies simultaneously thought her extraordinarily radiant and handsome.

"How can he know? Why, I have hardly talked about books to him at all."

"Well! here he comes," said Lady Winterbourne, smiling suddenly; "so I can ask him. But I am sure he did say so."

It was now Marcella's turn to colour. Aldous Raeburn crossed the room, greeted Lady Winterbourne, and next moment she felt her hand in his.

"You did tell me, Aldous, didn't you," said Lady Winterbourne, "that
Miss Boyce was a great reader?"

The speaker had known Aldous Raeburn as a boy, and was, moreover, a sort of cousin, which explained the Christian name.

Aldous smiled.

"I said I thought Miss Boyce was like you and me, and had a weakness that way, Lady Winterbourne. But I won't be cross-examined!"

"I don't think I am a great reader," said Marcella, bluntly—"at least I read a great deal, but I hardly ever read a book through. I haven't patience."

"You want to get at everything so quickly?" said Miss Raeburn, looking up sharply.

"I suppose so!" said Marcella. "There seems to be always a hundred things tearing one different ways, and no time for any of them."

"Yes, when one is young one feels like that," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing. "When one is old one accepts one's limitations. When I was twenty I never thought that I should still be an ignorant and discontented woman at nearly seventy."

"It is because you are so young still, Lady Winterbourne, that you feel so," said Aldous, laughing at her, as one does at an old friend. "Why, you are younger than any of us! I feel all brushed and stirred up—a boy at school again—after I have been to see you!"

"Well, I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing again. Then she looked at the pair beside her—at the alert brightness in the man's strong and quiet face as he sat stooping forward, with his hands upon his knees, hardly able to keep his eyes for an instant from the dark apparition beside him—at the girl's evident shyness and pride.

"My dear!" she said, turning suddenly to Miss Raeburn, "have you heard what a monstrosity Alice has produced this last time in the way of a baby? It was born with four teeth!"

Miss Raeburn's astonishment fitted the provocation, and the two old friends fell into a gossip on the subject of Lady Winterbourne's numerous family, which was clearly meant for a tête-à-tête.

"Will you come and look at our tapestry?" said Aldous to his neighbour, after a few nothings had passed between them as to the weather and her walk from Mellor. "I think you would admire it, and I am afraid my grandfather will be a few minutes yet. He hoped to get home earlier than this, but his Board meeting was very long and important, and has kept him an unconscionable time."

Marcella rose, and they moved together towards the south end of the room where a famous piece of Italian Renaissance tapestry entirely filled the wall from side to side.

"How beautiful!" cried the girl, her eyes filling with delight. "What a delicious thing to live with."

And, indeed, it was the most adorable medley of forms, tints, suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing in flowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses. Both colour and subject were of fairyland. The golds and browns and pinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearled and warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty. It was Italy at the great moment—subtle, rich, exuberant.

Aldous enjoyed her pleasure.

"I thought you would like it; I hoped you would. It has been my special delight since I was a child, when my mother first routed it out of a garret. I am not sure that I don't in my heart prefer it to any of the pictures."

"The flowers!" said Marcella, absorbed in it—"look at them—the irises, the cyclamens, the lilies! It reminds one of the dreams one used to have when one was small of what it would be like to have flowers enough. I was at school, you know, in a part of England where one seemed always cheated out of them! We walked two and two along the straight roads, and I found one here and one there—but such a beggarly, wretched few, for all one's trouble. I used to hate the hard dry soil, and console myself by imagining countries where the flowers grew like this—yes, just like this, in a gold and pink and blue mass, so that one might thrust one's hands in and gather and gather till one was really satisfied! That is the worst of being at school when you are poor! You never get enough of anything. One day it's flowers—but the next day it is pudding—and the next frocks."

Her eye was sparkling, her tongue loosened. Not only was it pleasant to feel herself beside him, enwrapped in such an atmosphere of admiration and deference, but the artistic sensitive chord in her had been struck, and vibrated happily.

"Well, only wait till May, and the cowslips in your own fields will make up to you!" he said, smiling at her. "But now, I have been wondering to myself in my room upstairs what you would like to see. There are a good many treasures in this house, and you will care for them, because you are an artist. But you shall not be bored with them! You shall see what and as much as you like. You had about a quarter of an hour's talk with my aunt, did you not?" he asked, in a quite different tone.

So all the time while she and Miss Raeburn had been making acquaintance, he had known that she was in the house, and he had kept away for his own purposes! Marcella felt a colour she could not restrain leap into her cheek.

"Miss Raeburn was very kind," she said, with a return of shyness, which passed however the next moment by reaction, into her usual daring. "Yes, she was very kind!—but all the same she doesn't like me—I don't think she is going to like me—I am not her sort."

"Have you been talking Socialism to her?" he asked her, smiling.

"No, not yet—not yet," she said emphatically. "But I am dreadfully uncertain—I can't always hold my tongue—I am afraid you will be sorry you took me up."

"Are you so aggressive? But Aunt Neta is so mild!—she wouldn't hurt a fly. She mothers every one in the house and out of it. The only people she is hard upon are the little servant girls, who will wear feathers in their hats!"

"There!" cried Marcella, indignantly. "Why shouldn't they wear feathers in their hats? It is their form of beauty—their tapestry!"

"But if one can't have both feathers and boots?" he asked her humbly, a twinkle in his grey eye. "If one hasn't boots, one may catch a cold and die of it—which is, after all, worse than going featherless."

"But why can't they have feathers and boots? It is because you—we—have got too much. You have the tapestry—and—and the pictures"—she turned and looked round the room—"and this wonderful house—and the park. Oh, no—I think it is Miss Raeburn has too many feathers!"

"Perhaps it is," he admitted, in a different tone, his look changing and saddening as though some habitual struggle of thought were recalled to him. "You see I am in a difficulty. I want to show you our feathers. I think they would please you—and you make me ashamed of them."

"How absurd!" cried Marcella, "when I told you how I liked the school children bobbing to me!"

They laughed, and then Aldous looked round with a start—"Ah, here is my grandfather!"

Then he stood back, watching the look with which Lord Maxwell, after greeting Lady Winterbourne, approached Miss Boyce. He saw the old man's somewhat formal approach, the sudden kindle in the blue eyes which marked the first effect of Marcella's form and presence, the bow, the stately shake of the hand. The lover hearing his own heart beat, realised that his beautiful lady had so far done well.

"You must let me say that I see a decided likeness in you to your grandfather," said Lord Maxwell, when they were all seated at lunch, Marcella on his left hand, opposite to Lady Winterbourne. "He was one of my dearest friends."

"I'm afraid I don't know much about him," said Marcella, rather bluntly, "except what I have got out of old letters. I never saw him that I remember."

Lord Maxwell left the subject, of course, at once, but showed a great wish to talk to her, and make her talk. He had pleasant things to say about Mellor and its past, which could be said without offence; and some conversation about the Boyce monuments in Mellor church led to a discussion of the part played by the different local families in the Civil Wars, in which it seemed to Aldous that his grandfather tried in various shrewd and courteous ways to make Marcella feel at ease with herself and her race, accepted, as it were, of right into the local brotherhood, and so to soothe and heal those bruised feelings he could not but divine.

The girl carried herself a little loftily, answering with an independence and freedom beyond her age and born of her London life. She was not in the least abashed or shy. Yet it was clear that Lord Maxwell's first impressions were favourable. Aldous caught every now and then his quick, judging look sweeping over her and instantly withdrawn—comparing, as the grandson very well knew, every point, and tone, and gesture with some inner ideal of what a Raeburn's wife should be. How dream-like the whole scene was to Aldous, yet how exquisitely real! The room, with its carved and gilt cedar-wood panels, its Vandykes, its tall windows opening on the park, the autumn sun flooding the gold and purple fruit on the table, and sparkling on the glass and silver, the figures of his aunt and Lady Winterbourne, the moving servants, and dominant of it all, interpreting it all for him anew, the dark, lithe creature beside his grandfather, so quick, sensitive, extravagant, so much a woman, yet, to his lover's sense, so utterly unlike any other woman he had ever seen—every detail of it was charged to him with a thousand new meanings, now oppressive, now delightful.

For he was passing out of the first stage of passion, in which it is, almost, its own satisfaction, so new and enriching is it to the whole nature, into the second stage—the stage of anxiety, incredulity. Marcella, sitting there on his own ground, after all his planning, seemed to him not nearer, but further from him. She was terribly on her dignity! Where was all that girlish abandonment gone which she had shown him on that walk, beside the gate? There had been a touch of it, a divine touch, before luncheon. How could he get her to himself again?

Meanwhile the conversation passed to the prevailing local topic—the badness of the harvest, the low prices of everything, the consequent depression among the farmers, and stagnation in the villages.

"I don't know what is to be done for the people this winter," said Lord Maxwell, "without pauperising them, I mean. To give money is easy enough. Our grandfathers would have doled out coal and blankets, and thought no more of it. We don't get through so easily."

"No," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing. "It weighs one down. Last winter was a nightmare. The tales one heard, and the faces one saw!—though we seemed to be always giving. And in the middle of it Edward would buy me a new set of sables. I begged him not, but he laughed at me."

"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, cheerfully, "if nobody bought sables, there'd be other poor people up in Russia, isn't it?—or Hudson's Bay?—badly off. One has, to think of that. Oh, you needn't talk, Aldous! I know you say it's a fallacy. I call it common sense."

She got, however, only a slight smile from Aldous, who had long ago left his great-aunt to work out her own economics. And, anyway, she saw that he was wholly absorbed from his seat beside Lady Winterbourne in watching Miss Boyce.

"It's precisely as Lord Maxwell says," replied Lady Winterbourne; "that kind of thing used to satisfy everybody. And our grandmothers were very good women. I don't know why we, who give ourselves so much more trouble than they did, should carry these thorns about with us, while they went free."

She drew herself up, a cloud over her fine eyes. Miss Raeburn, looking round, was glad to see the servants had left the room.

"Miss Boyce thinks we are all in a very bad way, I'm sure. I have heard tales of Miss Boyce's opinions!" said Lord Maxwell, smiling at her, with an old man's indulgence, as though provoking her to talk.

Her slim fingers were nervously crumbling some bread beside her; her head was drooped a little. At his challenge she looked up with a start. She was perfectly conscious of him, as both the great magnate on his native heath, and as the trained man of affairs condescending to a girl's fancies. But she had made up her mind not to be afraid.

"What tales have you heard?" she asked him.

"You alarm us, you know," he said gallantly, waiving her question. "We can't afford a prophetess to the other side, just now."

Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, which escaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.

"Oh! I am not a Radical!" said Marcella, half scornfully. "We Socialists don't fight for either political party as such. We take what we can get out of both."

"So you call yourself a Socialist? A real full-blown one?"

Lord Maxwell's pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after a morning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement at luncheon.

"Yes, I am a Socialist," she said slowly, looking at him. "At least I ought to be—I am in my conscience."

"But not in your judgment?" he said laughing. "Isn't that the condition of most of us?"

"No, not at all!" she exclaimed, both her vanity and her enthusiasm roused by his manner. "Both my judgment and my conscience make me a Socialist. It's only one's wretched love for one's own little luxuries and precedences—the worst part of one—that makes me waver, makes me a traitor! The people I worked with in London would think me a traitor often, I know."

"And you really think that the world ought to be 'hatched over again and hatched different'? That it ought to be, if it could be?"

"I think that things are intolerable as they are," she broke out, after a pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to me worse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty—such mutilation of mind and body—were meant to go on for ever!"

Lord Maxwell's brows lifted. But it certainly was no wonder that Aldous should find those eyes of hers superb?

"Can you really imagine, my dear young lady," he asked her mildly, "that if all property were divided to-morrow the force of natural inequality would not have undone all the work the day after, and given us back our poor?"

The "newspaper cant" of this remark, as the Cravens would have put it, brought a contemptuous look for an instant into the girl's face. She began to talk eagerly and cleverly, showing a very fair training in the catch words of the school, and a good memory—as one uncomfortable person at the table soon perceived—for some of the leading arguments and illustrations of a book of Venturist Essays which had lately been much read and talked of in London.

Then, irritated more and more by Lord Maxwell's gentle attention, and the interjections he threw in from time to time, she plunged into history, attacked the landowning class, spoke of the Statute of Labourers, the Law of Settlement, the New Poor Law, and other great matters, all in the same quick flow of glancing, picturesque speech, and all with the same utter oblivion—so it seemed to her stiff indignant hostess at the other end of the table—of the manners and modesty proper to a young girl in a strange house, and that young girl Richard Boyce's daughter!

Aldous struck in now and then, trying to soothe her by supporting her to a certain extent, and so divert the conversation. But Marcella was soon too excited to be managed; and she had her say; a very strong say often as far as language went: there could be no doubt of that.

"Ah, well," said Lord Maxwell, wincing at last under some of her phrases, in spite of his courteous savoir-faire, "I see you are of the same opinion as a good man whose book I took up yesterday: 'The landlords of England have always shown a mean and malignant passion for profiting by the miseries of others?' Well, Aldous, my boy, we are judged, you and I—no help for it!"

The man whose temper and rule had made the prosperity of a whole country
side for nearly forty years, looked at his grandson with twinkling eyes.
Miss Raeburn was speechless. Lady Winterbourne was absently staring at
Marcella, a spot of red on each pale cheek.

Then Marcella suddenly wavered, looked across at Aldous, and broke down.

"Of course, you think me very ridiculous," she said, with a tremulous change of tone. "I suppose I am. And I am as inconsistent as anybody—I hate myself for it. Very often when anybody talks to me on the other side, I am almost as much persuaded as I am by the Socialists: they always told me in London I was the prey of the last speaker. But it can't make any difference to one's feeling: nothing touches that."

She turned to Lord Maxwell, half appealing—

"It is when I go down from our house to the village; when I see the places the people live in; when one is comfortable in the carriage, and one passes some woman in the rain, ragged and dirty and tired, trudging back from her work; when one realises that they have no rights when they come to be old, nothing to look to but charity, for which we, who have everything, expect them to be grateful; and when I know that every one of them has done more useful work in a year of their life than I shall ever do in the whole of mine, then I feel that the whole state of things is somehow wrong and topsy-turvy and wicked." Her voice rose a little, every emphasis grew more passionate. "And if I don't do something—the little such a person as I can—to alter it before I die, I might as well never have lived."

Everybody at table started. Lord Maxwell looked at Miss Raeburn, his mouth twitching over the humour of his sister's dismay. Well! this was a forcible young woman: was Aldous the kind of man to be able to deal conveniently with such eyes, such emotions, such a personality?

Suddenly Lady Winterbourne's deep voice broke in:

"I never could say it half so well as that, Miss Boyce; but I agree with you. I may say that I have agreed with you all my life."

The girl turned to her, grateful and quivering.

"At the same time," said Lady Winterbourne, relapsing with a long breath from tragic emphasis into a fluttering indecision equally characteristic, "as you say, one is inconsistent. I was poor once, before Edward came to the title, and I did not at all like it—not at all. And I don't wish my daughters to marry poor men; and what I should do without a maid or a carriage when I wanted it, I cannot imagine. Edward makes the most of these things. He tells me I have to choose between things as they are, and a graduated income tax which would leave nobody—not even the richest—more than four hundred a year."

"Just enough, for one of those little houses on your station road," said Lord Maxwell, laughing at her. "I think you might still have a maid."

"There, you laugh," said Lady Winterbourne, vehemently: "the men do. But I tell you it is no laughing matter to feel that your heart and conscience have gone over to the enemy. You want to feel with your class, and you can't. Think of what used to happen in the old days. My grandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was driving home through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourer who was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her. She stopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there and then—the old stocks were still standing on the village green. Then she drove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night with more consciousness than usual of having done her duty. But if the power of the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend"—and she laid her thin old woman's hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell's arm—"we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of right in our place and position—at least I find I have. In the old days if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it down with a strong hand."

"So they would still," said Lord Maxwell, drily, "if there were violence. Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you will see where all these Socialist theories will be. And of course it will not be we—not the landowners or the capitalists—who will put it down. It will be the hundreds and thousands of people with something to lose—a few pounds in a joint-stock mill, a house of their own built through a co-operative store, an acre or two of land stocked by their own savings—it is they, I am afraid, who will put Miss Boyce's friends down so far as they represent any real attack on property—and brutally, too, I fear, if need be."

"I dare say," exclaimed Marcella, her colour rising again. "I never can see how we Socialists are to succeed. But how can any one rejoice in it? How can any one wish that the present state of things should go on? Oh! the horrors one sees in London. And down here, the cottages, and the starvation wages, and the ridiculous worship of game, and then, of course, the poaching—"

Miss Raeburn pushed back her chair with a sharp noise. But her brother was still peeling his pear, and no one else moved. Why did he let such talk go on? It was too unseemly.

Lord Maxwell only laughed. "My dear young lady," he said, much amused, "are you even in the frame of mind to make a hero of a poacher? Disillusion lies that way!—it does indeed. Why—Aldous!—I have been hearing such tales from Westall this morning. I stopped at Corbett's farm a minute or two on the way home, and met Westall at the gate coming out. He says he and his men are being harried to death round about Tudley End by a gang of men that come, he thinks, from Oxford, a driving gang with a gig, who come at night or in the early morning—the smartest rascals out, impossible to catch. But he says he thinks he will soon have his hand on the local accomplice—a Mellor man—a man named Hurd: not one of our labourers, I think."

"Hurd!" cried Marcella, in dismay. "Oh no, it can't be—impossible!"

Lord Maxwell looked at her in astonishment.

"Do you know any Hurds? I am afraid your father will find that Mellor is a bad place for poaching."

"If it is, it is because they are so starved and miserable," said Marcella, trying hard to speak coolly, but excited almost beyond bounds by the conversation and all that it implied. "And the Hurds—I don't believe it a bit! But if it were true—oh! they have been in such straits—they were out of work most of last winter; they are out of work now, No one could grudge them. I told you about them, didn't I?" she said, suddenly glancing at Aldous. "I was going to ask you to-day, if you could help them?" Her prophetess air had altogether left her. She felt ready to cry; and nothing could have been more womanish than her tone.

He bent across to her. Miss Raeburn, invaded by a new and intolerable sense of calamity, could have beaten him for what she read in his shining eyes, and in the flush on his usually pale cheek.

"Is he still out of work?" he said. "And you are unhappy about it? But I am sure we can find him work: I am just now planning improvements at the north end of the park. We can take him on; I am certain of it. You must give me his full name and address."

"And let him beware of Westall," said Lord Maxwell, kindly. "Give him a hint, Miss Boyce, and nobody will rake up bygones. There is nothing I dislike so much as rows about the shooting. All the keepers know that."

"And of course," said Miss Raeburn, coldly, "if the family are in real distress there are plenty of people at hand to assist them. The man need not steal."

"Oh, charity!" cried Marcella, her lip curling.

"A worse crime than poaching, you think," said Lord Maxwell, laughing. "Well, these are big subjects. I confess, after my morning with the lunatics, I am half inclined, like Horace Walpole, to think everything serious ridiculous. At any rate shall we see what light a cup of coffee throws upon it? Agneta, shall we adjourn?"

CHAPTER XI.

Lord Maxwell closed the drawing-room door behind Aldous and Marcella. Aldous had proposed to take their guest to see the picture gallery, which was on the first floor, and had found her willing.

The old man came back to the two other women, running his hand nervously through his shock of white hair—a gesture which Miss Raeburn well knew to show some disturbance of mind.

"I should like to have your opinion of that young lady," he said deliberately, taking a chair immediately in front of them.

"I like her," said Lady Winterbourne, instantly. "Of course she is crude and extravagant, and does not know quite what she may say. But all that will improve. I like her, and shall make friends with her."

Miss Raeburn threw up her hands in angry amazement.

"Most forward, conceited, and ill-mannered," she said with energy. "I am certain she has no proper principles, and as to what her religious views may be, I dread to think of them! If that is a specimen of the girls of the present day—"

"My dear," interrupted Lord Maxwell, laying a hand on her knee, "Lady
Winterbourne is an old friend, a very old friend. I think we may be
frank before her, and I don't wish you to say things you may regret.
Aldous has made up his mind to get that girl to marry him, if he can."

Lady Winterbourne was silent, having in fact been forewarned by that odd little interview with Aldous in her own drawing-room, when he had suddenly asked her to call on Mrs. Boyce. But she looked at Miss Raeburn. That lady took up her knitting, laid it down again, resumed it, then broke out—

"How did it come about? Where have they been meeting?"

"At the Hardens mostly. He seems to have been struck from the beginning, and now there is no question as to his determination. But she may not have him; he professes to be still entirely in the dark."

"Oh!" cried Miss Raeburn, with a scornful shrug, meant to express all possible incredulity. Then she began to knit fast and furiously, and presently said in great agitation,—

"What can he be thinking of? She is very handsome, of course, but—" then her words failed her. "When Aldous remembers his mother, how can he?—undisciplined! self-willed! Why, she laid down the law to you, Henry, as though you had nothing to do but to take your opinions from a chit of a girl like her. Oh! no, no; I really can't; you must give me time. And her father—the disgrace and trouble of it! I tell you, Henry, it will bring misfortune!"

Lord Maxwell was much troubled. Certainly he should have talked to Agneta beforehand. But the fact was he had his cowardice, like other men, and he had been trusting to the girl herself, to this beauty he heard so much of, to soften the first shock of the matter to the present mistress of the Court.

"We will hope not, Agneta," he said gravely. "We will hope not. But you must remember Aldous is no boy. I cannot coerce him. I see the difficulties, and I have put them before him. But I am more favourably struck with the girl than you are. And anyway, if it comes about, we must make the best of it."

Miss Raeburn made no answer, but pretended to set her heel, her needles shaking. Lady Winterbourne was very sorry for her two old friends.

"Wait a little," she said, laying her hand lightly on Miss Raeburn's. "No doubt with her opinions she felt specially drawn to assert herself to-day. One can imagine it very well of a girl, and a generous girl in her position. You will see other sides of her, I am sure you will. And you would never—you could never—make a breach with Aldous."

"We must all remember," said Lord Maxwell, getting up and beginning to walk up and down beside them, "that Aldous is in no way dependent upon me. He has his own resources. He could leave us to-morrow. Dependent on me! It is the other way, I think, Agneta—don't you?"

He stopped and looked at her, and she returned his look in spite of herself. A tear dropped on her stocking which she hastily brushed away.

"Come, now," said Lord Maxwell, seating himself; "let us talk it over rationally. Don't go, Lady Winterbourne."

"Why, they may be settling it at this moment," cried Miss Raeburn, half-choked, and feeling as though "the skies were impious not to fall."

"No, no!" he said smiling. "Not yet, I think. But let us prepare ourselves."

* * * * *

Meanwhile the cause of all this agitation was sitting languidly in a great Louis Quinze chair in the picture gallery upstairs, with Aldous beside her. She had taken off her big hat as though it oppressed her, and her black head lay against a corner of the chair in fine contrast to its mellowed golds and crimsons. Opposite to her were two famous Holbein portraits, at which she looked from time to time as though attracted to them in spite of herself, by some trained sense which could not be silenced. But she was not communicative, and Aldous was anxious.

"Do you think I was rude to your grandfather?" she asked him at last abruptly, cutting dead short some information she had stiffly asked him for just before, as to the date of the gallery and its collection.

"Rude!" he said startled. "Not at all. Not in the least. Do you suppose we are made of such brittle stuff, we poor landowners, that we can't stand an argument now and then?"

"Your aunt thought I was rude," she said unheeding. "I think I was. But a house like this excites me." And with a little reckless gesture she turned her head over her shoulder and looked down the gallery. A Velasquez was beside her; a great Titian over the way; a priceless Rembrandt beside it. On her right hand stood a chair of carved steel, presented by a German town to a German emperor, which, had not its equal in Europe; the brocade draping the deep windows in front of her had been specially made to grace a state visit to the house of Charles II.

"At Mellor," she went on, "we are old and tumble-down. The rain comes in; there are no shutters to the big hall, and we can't afford to put them—we can't afford even to have the pictures cleaned. I can pity the house and nurse it, as I do the village. But here—"

And looking about her, she gave a significant shrug.

"What—our feathers again!" he said laughing. "But consider. Even you allow that Socialism cannot begin to-morrow. There must be a transition time, and clearly till the State is ready to take over the historical houses and their contents, the present nominal owners of them are bound, if they can, to take care of them. Otherwise the State will be some day defrauded."

She could not be insensible to the charm of his manner towards her. There was in it, no doubt, the natural force and weight of the man older and better informed than his companion, and amused every now and then by her extravagance. But even her irritable pride could not take offence. For the intellectual dissent she felt at bottom was tempered by a moral sympathy of which the gentleness and warmth touched and moved her in spite of herself. And now that they were alone he could express himself. So long as they had been in company he had seemed to her, as often before, shy, hesitating, and ineffective. But with the disappearance of spectators, who represented to him, no doubt, the harassing claim of the critical judgment, all was freer, more assured, more natural.

She leant her chin on her hand, considering his plea.

"Supposing you live long enough to see the State take it, shall you be able to reconcile yourself to it? Or shall you feel it a wrong, and go out a rebel?"

A delightful smile was beginning to dance in the dark eyes. She was recovering the tension of her talk with Lord Maxwell.

"All must depend, you see, on the conditions—on how you and your friends are going to manage the transition. You may persuade me—conceivably—or you may eject me with violence."

"Oh, no!" she interposed quickly. "There will be no violence. Only we shall gradually reduce your wages. Of course, we can't do without leaders—we don't want to do away with the captains of any industry, agricultural or manufacturing. Only we think you overpaid. You must be content with less."

"Don't linger out the process," he said laughing, "otherwise it will be painful. The people who are condemned to live in these houses before the Commune takes to them, while your graduated land and income taxes are slowly starving them out, will have a bad time of it."

"Well, it will be your first bad time! Think of the labourer now, with five children, of school age, on twelve shillings a week—think of the sweated women in London."

"Ah, think of them," he said in a different tone.

There was a pause of silence.

"No!" said Marcella, springing up. "Don't let's think of them. I get to believe the whole thing a pose in myself and other people. Let's go back to the pictures. Do you think Titian 'sweated' his drapery men—paid them starvation rates, and grew rich on their labour? Very likely. All the same, that blue woman"—she pointed to a bending Magdalen—"will be a joy to all time."

They wandered through the gallery, and she was now all curiosity, pleasure, and intelligent interest, as though she had thrown off an oppression. Then they emerged into the upper corridor answering to the corridor of the antiques below. This also was hung with pictures, principally family portraits of the second order, dating back to the Tudors—a fine series of berobed and bejewelled personages, wherein clothes pre-dominated and character was unimportant.

Marcella's eye was glancing along the brilliant colour of the wall, taking rapid note of jewelled necks surmounting stiff embroidered dresses, of the whiteness of lace ruffs, or the love-locks and gleaming satin of the Caroline beauties, when it suddenly occurred to her,—

"I shall be their successor. This is already potentially mine. In a few months, if I please, I shall be walking this house as mistress—its future mistress, at any rate!"

She was conscious of a quickening in the blood, a momentary blurring of the vision. A whirlwind of fancies swept across her. She thought of herself as the young peeress—Lord Maxwell after all was over seventy—her own white neck blazing with diamonds, the historic jewels of a great family—her will making law in this splendid house—in the great domain surrounding it. What power—what a position—what a romance! She, the out-at-elbows Marcella, the Socialist, the friend of the people. What new lines of social action and endeavour she might strike out! Miss Raeburn should not stop her. She caressed the thought of the scandals in store for that lady. Only it annoyed her that her dream of large things should be constantly crossed by this foolish delight, making her feet dance—in this mere prospect of satin gowns and fine jewels—of young and fêted beauty holding its brilliant court. If she made such a marriage, it should be, it must be, on public grounds. Her friends must have no right to blame her.

Then she stole a glance at the tall, quiet gentleman beside her. A man to be proud of from the beginning, and surely to be very fond of in time. "He would always be my friend," she thought. "I could lead him. He is very clever, one can see, and knows a great deal. But he admires what I like. His position hampers him—but I could help him to get beyond it. We might show the way to many!"

"Will you come and see this room here?" he said, stopping suddenly, yet with a certain hesitation in the voice. "It is my own sitting-room. There are one or two portraits I should like to show you if you would let me."

She followed him with a rosy cheek, and they were presently standing in front of the portrait of his mother. He spoke of his recollections of his parents, quietly and simply, yet she felt through every nerve that he was not the man to speak of such things to anybody in whom he did not feel a very strong and peculiar interest. As he was talking a rush of liking towards him came across her. How good he was—how affectionate beneath his reserve—a woman might securely trust him with her future.

So with every minute she grew softer, her eye gentler, and with each step and word he seemed to himself to be carried deeper into the current of joy. Intoxication was mounting within him, as her slim, warm youth moved and breathed beside him; and it was natural that he should read her changing behaviour for something other than it was. A man of his type asks for no advance from the woman; the woman he loves does not make them; but at the same time he has a natural self-esteem, and believes readily in his power to win the return he is certain he will deserve.

"And this?" she said, moving restlessly towards his table, and taking up the photograph of Edward Hallin.

"Ah! that is the greatest friend I have in the world. But I am sure you know the name. Mr. Hallin—Edward Hallin."

She paused bewildered.

"What! the Mr. Hallin—that was Edward Hallin—who settled the Nottingham strike last month—who lectures so much in the East End, and in the north?"

"The same. We are old college friends. I owe him much, and in all his excitements he does not forget old friends. There, you see—" and he opened a blotting book and pointed smiling to some closely written sheets lying within it—"is my last letter to him. I often write two of those in the week, and he to me. We don't agree on a number of things, but that doesn't matter."

"What can you find to write about?" she said wondering. "I thought nobody wrote letters nowadays, only notes. Is it books, or people?"

"Both, when it pleases us!" How soon, oh! ye favouring gods, might he reveal to her the part she herself played in those closely covered sheets? "But he writes to me on social matters chiefly. His whole heart, as you probably know, is in certain experiments and reforms in which he sometimes asks me to help him."

Marcella opened her eyes. These were new lights. She began to recall all that she had heard of young Hallin's position in the Labour movement; his personal magnetism and prestige; his power as a speaker. Her Socialist friends, she remembered, thought him in the way—a force, but a dangerous one. He was for the follies of compromise—could not be got to disavow the principle of private property, while ready to go great lengths in certain directions towards collective action and corporate control. The "stalwarts" of her sect would have none of him as a leader, while admitting his charm as a human being—a charm she remembered to have heard discussed with some anxiety among her Venturist friends. But for ordinary people he went far enough. Her father, she remembered, had dubbed him an "Anarchist" in connection with the terms he had been able to secure for the Nottingham strikers, as reported in the newspapers. It astonished her to come across the man again as Mr. Raeburn's friend.

They talked about Hallin a little, and about Aldous's Cambridge acquaintance with him. Then Marcella, still nervous, went to look at the bookshelves, and found herself in front of that working collection of books on economics which Aldous kept in his own room under his hand, by way of guide to the very fine special collection he was gradually making in the library downstairs.

Here again were surprises for her. Aldous had never made the smallest claim to special knowledge on all those subjects she had so often insisted on making him discuss. He had been always tentative and diffident, deferential even so far as her own opinions were concerned. And here already was the library of a student. All the books she had ever read or heard discussed were here—and as few among many. The condition of them, moreover, the signs of close and careful reading she noticed in them, as she took them out, abashed her: she had never learnt to read in this way. It was her first contact with an exact and arduous culture. She thought of how she had instructed Lord Maxwell at luncheon. No doubt he shared his grandson's interests. Her cheek burned anew; this time because it seemed to her that she had been ridiculous.

"I don't know why you never told me you took a particular interest in these subjects," she said suddenly, turning round upon him resentfully—she had just laid down, of all things, a volume of Venturist essays. "You must have thought I talked a great deal of nonsense at luncheon."

"Why!—I have always been delighted to find you cared for such things and took an interest in them. How few women do!" he said quite simply, opening his eyes. "Do you know these three pamphlets? They were privately printed, and are very rare."

He took out a book and showed it to her as one does to a comrade and equal—as he might have done to Edward Hallin. But something was jarred in her—conscience or self-esteem—and she could not recover her sense of heroineship. She answered absently, and when he returned the book to the shelf she said that it was time for her to go, and would he kindly ask for her maid, who was to walk with her?

"I will ring for her directly," he said. "But you will let me take you home?" Then he added hurriedly, "I have some business this afternoon with a man who lives in your direction."

She assented a little stiffly—but with an inward thrill. His words and manner seemed suddenly to make the situation unmistakable. Among the books it had been for the moment obscured.

He rang for his own servant, and gave directions about the maid. Then they went downstairs that Marcella might say good-bye.

Miss Raeburn bade her guest farewell, with a dignity which her small person could sometimes assume, not unbecomingly. Lady Winterbourne held the girl's hand a little, looked her out of countenance, and insisted on her promising again to come to Winterbourne Park the following Tuesday. Then Lord Maxwell, with old-fashioned politeness, made Marcella take his arm through the hall.

"You must come and see us again," he said smiling; "though we are such belated old Tories, we are not so bad as we sound."

And under cover of his mild banter he fixed a penetrating attentive look upon her. Flushed and embarrassed! Had it indeed been done already? or would Aldous settle it on this walk? To judge from his manner and hers, the thing was going with rapidity. Well, well, there was nothing for it but to hope for the best.

On their way through the hall she stopped him, her hand still in his arm. Aldous was in front, at the door, looking for a light shawl she had brought with her.

"I should like to thank you," she said shyly, "about the Hurds. It will be very kind of you and Mr. Raeburn to find them work."

Lord Maxwell was pleased; and with the usual unfair advantage of beauty her eyes and curving lips gave her little advance a charm infinitely beyond what any plainer woman could have commanded.

"Oh, don't thank me!" he said cheerily. "Thank Aldous. He does all that kind of thing. And if in your good works you want any help we can give, ask it, my dear young lady. My old comrade's grand-daughter will always find friends in this house."

Lord Maxwell would have been very much astonished to hear himself making this speech six weeks before. As it was, he handed her over gallantly to Aldous, and stood on the steps looking after them in a stir of mind not unnoted by the confidential butler who held the door open behind him. Would Aldous insist on carrying his wife off to the dower house on the other side of the estate? or would they be content to stay in the old place with the old people? And if so, how were that girl and his sister to get on? As for himself, he was of a naturally optimist temper, and ever since the night of his first interview with Aldous on the subject, he had been more and more inclining to take a cheerful view. He liked to see a young creature of such evident character and cleverness holding opinions and lines of her own. It was infinitely better than mere nonentity. Of course, she was now extravagant and foolish, perhaps vain too. But that would mend with time—mend, above all, with her position as Aldous's wife. Aldous was a strong man—how strong, Lord Maxwell suspected that this impetuous young lady hardly knew. No, he thought the family might be trusted to cope with her when once they got her among them. And she would certainly be an ornament to the old house.

Her father of course was, and would be, the real difficulty, and the blight which had descended on the once honoured name. But a man so conscious of many kinds of power as Lord Maxwell could not feel much doubt as to his own and his grandson's competence to keep so poor a specimen of humanity as Richard Boyce in his place. How wretchedly ill, how feeble, both in body and soul, the fellow had looked when he and Winterbourne met him!

The white-haired owner of the Court walked back slowly to his library, his hands in his pockets, his head bent in cogitation. Impossible to settle to the various important political letters lying on his table, and bearing all of them on that approaching crisis in the spring which must put Lord Maxwell and his friends in power. He was over seventy, but his old blood quickened within him as he thought of those two on this golden afternoon, among the beech woods. How late Aldous had left all these experiences! His grandfather, by twenty, could have shown him the way.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the two in question were walking along the edge of the hill rampart overlooking the plain, with the road on one side of them, and the falling beech woods on the other. They were on a woodland path, just within the trees, sheltered, and to all intents and purposes alone. The maid, with leisurely discretion, was following far behind them on the high road.

Marcella, who felt at moments as though she could hardly breathe, by reason of a certain tumult of nerve, was yet apparently bent on maintaining a conversation without breaks. As they diverged from the road into the wood-path, she plunged into the subject of her companion's election prospects. How many meetings did he find that he must hold in the month? What places did he regard as his principal strongholds? She was told that certain villages, which she named, were certain to go Radical, whatever might be the Tory promises. As to a well-known Conservative League, which was very strong in the country, and to which all the great ladies, including Lady Winterbourne, belonged, was he actually going to demean himself by accepting its support? How was it possible to defend the bribery, buns, and beer by which it won its corrupting way?

Altogether, a quick fire of questions, remarks, and sallies, which Aldous met and parried as best he might, comforting himself all the time by thought of those deeper and lonelier parts of the wood which lay before them. At last she dropped out, half laughing, half defiant, words which arrested him,—

"Well, I shall know what the other side think of their prospects very soon. Mr. Wharton is coming to lunch with us to-morrow."

"Harry Wharton!" he said astonished. "But Mr. Boyce is not supporting him. Your father, I think, is Conservative?"

One of Dick Boyce's first acts as owner of Mellor, when social rehabilitation had still looked probable to him, had been to send a contribution to the funds of the League aforesaid, so that Aldous had public and conspicuous grounds for his remark.

"Need one measure everything by politics?" she asked him a little disdainfully. "Mayn't one even feed a Radical?"

He winced visibly a moment, touched in his philosopher's pride.

"You remind me," he said, laughing and reddening—"and justly—that an election perverts all one's standards and besmirches all one's morals. Then I suppose Mr. Wharton is an old friend?"

"Papa never saw him before last week," she said carelessly. "Now he talks of asking him to stay some time, and says that, although he won't vote for him, he hopes that he will make a good fight."

Raeburn's brow contracted in a puzzled frown.

"He will make an excellent fight," he said rather shortly. "Dodgson hardly hopes to get in. Harry Wharton is a most taking speaker, a very clever fellow, and sticks at nothing in the way of promises. Ah, you will find him interesting, Miss Boyce! He has a co-operative farm on his Lincolnshire property. Last year he started a Labour paper—which I believe you read. I have heard you quote it. He believes in all that you hope for—great increase in local government and communal control—the land for the people—graduated income-tax—the extinction of landlord and capitalist as soon as may be—e tutti quanti. He talks with great eloquence and ability. In our villages I find he is making way every week. The people think his manners perfect. ''Ee 'as a way wi' un,' said an old labourer to me last week. 'If 'ee wor to coe the wild birds, I do believe, Muster Raeburn, they'd coom to un!'"

"Yet you dislike him!" said Marcella, a daring smile dancing on the dark face she turned to him. "One can hear it in every word you say."

He hesitated, trying, even at the moment that an impulse of jealous alarm which astonished himself had taken possession of him, to find the moderate and measured phrase.

"I have known him from a boy," he said. "He is a connection of the Levens, and used to be always there in old days. He is very brilliant and very gifted—"

"Your 'but' must be very bad," she threw in, "it is so long in coming."

"Then I will say, whatever opening it gives you," he replied with spirit, "that I admire him without respecting him."

"Who ever thought otherwise of a clever opponent?" she cried. "It is the stock formula."

The remark stung, all the more because Aldous was perfectly conscious that there was much truth in her implied charge of prejudice. He had never been very capable of seeing this particular man in the dry light of reason, and was certainly less so than before, since it had been revealed to him that Wharton and Mr. Boyce's daughter were to be brought, before long, into close neighbourhood.

"I am sorry that I seem to you such a Pharisee," he said, turning upon her a look which had both pain and excitement in it.

She was silent, and they walked on a few yards without speaking. The wood had thickened around them: The high road was no longer visible. No sound of wheels or footsteps reached them. The sun struck freely through the beech-trees, already half bared, whitening the grey trunks at intervals to an arrowy distinctness and majesty, or kindling the slopes of red and freshly fallen leaves below into great patches of light and flame. Through the stems, as always, the girdling blues of the plain, and in their faces a gay and buoyant breeze, speaking rather of spring than autumn. Robins, "yellow autumn's nightingales," sang in the hedge to their right. In the pause between them, sun, wind, birds made their charm felt. Nature, perpetual chorus as she is to man, stole in, urging, wooing, defining. Aldous's heart leapt to the spur of a sudden resolve.

Instinctively she turned to him at the same moment as he to her, and seeing his look she paled a little.

"Do you guess at all why it hurts me to jar with you?" he said—finding his words in a rush, he did not know how—"Why every syllable of yours matters to me? It is because I have hopes—dreams—which have become my life! If you could accept this—this—feeling—this devotion—which has grown up in me—if you could trust yourself to me—you should have no cause, I think—ever—to think me hard or narrow towards any person, any enthusiasm for which you had sympathy. May I say to you all that is in my mind—or—or—am I presuming?"

She looked away from him, crimson again. A great wave of exultation—boundless, intoxicating—swept through her. Then it was checked by a nobler feeling—a quick, penitent sense of his nobleness.

"You don't know me," she said hurriedly: "you think you do. But I am all odds and ends. I should annoy—wound—disappoint you."

His quiet grey eyes flamed.

"Come and sit down here, on these dry roots," he said, taking already joyous command of her. "We shall be undisturbed. I have so much to say!"

She obeyed trembling. She felt no passion, but the strong thrill of something momentous and irreparable, together with a swelling pride—pride in such homage from such a man.

He led her a few steps down the slope, found a place for her against a sheltering trunk, and threw himself down beside her. As he looked up at the picture she made amid the autumn branches, at her bent head, her shy moved look, her white hand lying ungloved on her black dress, happiness overcame him. He took her hand, found she did not resist, drew it to him, and clasping it in both his, bent his brow, his lips upon it. It shook in his hold, but she was passive. The mixture of emotion and self-control she showed touched him deeply. In his chivalrous modesty he asked for nothing else, dreamt of nothing more.

Half an hour later they were still in the same spot. There had been much talk between them, most of it earnest, but some of it quite gay, broken especially by her smiles. Her teasing mood, however, had passed away. She was instead composed and dignified, like one conscious that life had opened before her to great issues.

Yet she had flinched often before that quiet tone of eager joy in which he had described his first impressions of her, his surprise at finding in her ideals, revolts, passions, quite unknown to him, so far, in the women of his own class. Naturally he suppressed, perhaps he had even forgotten, the critical amusement and irritation she had often excited in him. He remembered, he spoke only of sympathy, delight, pleasure—of his sense, as it were, of slaking some long-felt moral thirst at the well of her fresh feeling. So she had attracted him first,—by a certain strangeness and daring—by what she said—

"Now—and above all by what you are!" he broke out suddenly, moved out of his even speech. "Oh! it is too much to believe—to dream of! Put your hand in mine, and say again that it is really true that we two are to go forward together—that you will be always there to inspire—to help—"

And as she gave him the hand, she must also let him—in this first tremor of a pure passion—take the kiss which was now his by right. That she should flush and draw away from him as she did, seemed to him the most natural thing in the world, and the most maidenly.

Then, as their talk wandered on, bit by bit, he gave her all his confidence, and she had felt herself honoured in receiving it. She understood now at least something—a first fraction—of that inner life, masked so well beneath his quiet English capacity and unassuming manner. He had spoken of his Cambridge years, of his friend, of the desire of his heart to make his landowner's power and position contribute something towards that new and better social order, which he too, like Hallin—though more faintly and intermittently—believed to be approaching. The difficulties of any really new departure were tremendous; he saw them more plainly and more anxiously than Hallin. Yet he believed that he had thought his way to some effective reform on his grandfather's large estate, and to some useful work as one of a group of like-minded men in Parliament. She must have often thought him careless and apathetic towards his great trust. But he was not so—not careless—but paralysed often by intellectual difficulty, by the claims of conflicting truths.

She, too, explained herself most freely, most frankly. She would have nothing on her conscience.

"They will say, of course," she said with sudden nervous abruptness, "that I am marrying you for wealth and position. And in a sense I shall be. No! don't stop me! I should not marry you if—if—I did not like you. But you can give me—you have—great opportunities. I tell you frankly, I shall enjoy them and use them. Oh! do think well before you do it. I shall never be a meek, dependent wife. A woman, to my mind, is bound to cherish her own individuality sacredly, married or not married. Have you thought that I may often think it right to do things you disagree with, that may scandalise your relations?"

"You shall be free," he said steadily. "I have thought of it all."

"Then there is my father," she said, turning her head away. "He is ill—he wants pity, affection. I will accept no bond that forces me to disown him."

"Pity and affection are to me the most sacred things in the world," he said, kissing her hand gently. "Be content—be at rest—my beautiful lady!"

There was again silence, full of thought on her side, of heavenly happiness on his. The sun had sunk almost to the verge of the plain, the wind had freshened.

"We must go home," she said, springing up. "Taylor must have got there an hour ago. Mother will be anxious, and I must—I must tell them."

"I will leave you at the gate," he suggested as they walked briskly; "and you will ask your father, will you not, if I may see him to-night after dinner?"

The trees thinned again in front of them, and the path curved inward to the front. Suddenly a man, walking on the road, diverged into the path and came towards them. He was swinging a stick and humming. His head was uncovered, and his light chestnut curls were blown about his forehead by the wind. Marcella, looking up at the sound of the steps, had a sudden impression of something young and radiant, and Aldous stopped with an exclamation.

The new-comer perceived them, and at sight of Aldous smiled, and approached, holding out his hand.

"Why, Raeburn, I seem to have missed you twenty times a day this last fortnight. We have been always on each other's tracks without meeting. Yet I think, if we had met, we could have kept our tempers."

"Miss Boyce, I think you do not know Mr. Wharton," said Aldous, stiffly.
"May I introduce you?"

The young man's blue eyes, all alert and curious at the mention of Marcella's name, ran over the girl's face and form. Then he bowed with a certain charming exaggeration—like an eighteenth-century beau with his hand upon his heart—and turned back with them a step or two towards the road.

BOOK II.

"A woman has enough to govern wisely
Her own demeanours, passions and divisions."

CHAPTER I.

On a certain night in the December following the engagement of Marcella Boyce to Aldous Raeburn, the woods and fields of Mellor, and all the bare rampart of chalk down which divides the Buckinghamshire plain from the forest upland of the Chilterns lay steeped in moonlight, and in the silence which belongs to intense frost.

Winter had set in before the leaf had fallen from the last oaks; already there had been a fortnight or more of severe cold, with hardly any snow. The pastures were delicately white; the ditches and the wet furrows in the ploughed land, the ponds on Mellor common, and the stagnant pool in the midst of the village, whence it drew its main water supply, were frozen hard. But the ploughed chalk land itself lay a dull grey beside the glitter of the pastures, and the woods under the bright sun of the days dropped their rime only to pass once more with the deadly cold of the night under the fantastic empire of the frost. Every day the veil of morning mist rose lightly from the woods, uncurtaining the wintry spectacle, and melting into the brilliant azure of an unflecked sky; every night the moon rose without a breath of wind, without a cloud; and all the branch-work of the trees, where they stood in the open fields, lay reflected clean and sharp on the whitened ground. The bitter cold stole into the cottages, marking the old and feeble with the touch of Azrael; while without, in the field solitudes, bird and beast cowered benumbed and starving in hole and roosting place.

How still it was—this midnight—on the fringe of the woods! Two men sitting concealed among some bushes at the edge of Mr. Boyce's largest cover, and bent upon a common errand, hardly spoke to each other, so strange and oppressive was the silence. One was Jim Hurd; the other was a labourer, a son of old Patton of the almshouses, himself a man of nearly sixty, with a small wizened face showing sharp and white to-night under his slouched hat.

They looked out over a shallow cup of treeless land to a further bound of wooded hill, ending towards the north in a bare bluff of down shining steep under the moon. They were in shadow, and so was most of the wide dip of land before them; but through a gap to their right, beyond the wood, the moonbeams poured, and the farms nestling under the opposite ridge, the plantations ranging along it, and the bald beacon hill in which it broke to the plain, were all in radiant light.

Not a stir of life anywhere. Hurd put up his hand to his ear, and leaning forward listened intently. Suddenly—a vibration, a dull thumping sound in the soil of the bank immediately beside him. He started, dropped his hand, and, stooping, laid his ear to the ground.

"Gi' us the bag," he said to his companion, drawing himself upright. "You can hear 'em turnin' and creepin' as plain as anything. Now then, you take these and go t' other side."

He handed over a bundle of rabbit nets. Patton, crawling on hands and knees, climbed over the low overgrown bank on which the hedge stood into the precincts of the wood itself. The state of the hedge, leaving the cover practically open and defenceless along its whole boundary, showed plainly enough that it belonged to the Mellor estate. But the field beyond was Lord Maxwell's.

Hurd applied himself to netting the holes on his own side, pushing the brambles and undergrowth aside with the sure hand of one who had already reconnoitred the ground. Then he crept over to Patton to see that all was right on the other side, came back, and went for the ferrets, of whom he had four in a closely tied bag.

A quarter of an hour of intense excitement followed. In all, five rabbits bolted—three on Hurd's side, two on Patton's. It was all the two men could do to secure their prey, manage the ferrets, and keep a watch on the holes. Hurd's great hands—now fixing the pegs that held the nets, now dealing death to the entangled rabbit, whose neck he broke in an instant by a turn of the thumb, now winding up the line that held the ferret—seemed to be everywhere.

At last a ferret "laid up," the string attached to him having either slipped or broken, greatly to the disgust of the men, who did not want to be driven either to dig, which made a noise and took time, or to lose their animal. The rabbits made no more sign, and it was tolerably evident that they had got as much as they were likely to get out of that particular "bury."

Hurd thrust his arm deep into the hole where he had put the ferret.
"Ther's summat in the way," he declared at last. "Mos' likely a dead un.
Gi' me the spade."

He dug away the mouth of the hole, making as little noise as possible, and tried again.

"'Ere ee be," he cried, clutching at something, drew it out, exclaimed in disgust, flung it away, and pounced upon a rabbit which on the removal of the obstacle followed like a flash, pursued by the lost ferret. Hurd caught the rabbit by the neck, held it by main force, and killed it; then put the ferret into his pocket. "Lord!" he said, wiping his brow, "they do come suddent."

What he had pulled out was a dead cat; a wretched puss, who on some happy hunt had got itself wedged in the hole, and so perished there miserably. He and Patton stooped over it wondering; then Hurd walked some paces along the bank, looking warily out to the right of him across the open country all the time. He threw the poor malodorous thing far into the wood and returned.

The two men lit their pipes under the shelter of the bushes, and rested a bit, well hidden, but able to see out through a break in the bit of thicket.

"Six on 'em," said Hurd, looking at the stark creatures beside him. "I be too done to try another bury. I'll set a snare or two, an' be off home."

Patton puffed silently. He was wondering whether Hurd would give him one rabbit or two. Hurd had both "plant" and skill, and Patton would have been glad enough to come for one. Still he was a plaintive man with a perpetual grievance, and had already made up his mind that Hurd would treat him shabbily to-night, in spite of many past demonstrations that his companion was on the whole of a liberal disposition.

"You bin out workin' a day's work already, han't yer?" he said presently. He himself was out of work, like half the village, and had been presented by his wife with boiled swede for supper. But he knew that Hurd had been taken on at the works at the Court, where the new drive was being made, and a piece of ornamental water enlarged and improved—mainly for the sake of giving employment in bad times. He, Patton, and some of his mates, had tried to get a job there. But the steward had turned them back. The men off the estate had first claim, and there was not room for all of them. Yet Hurd had been taken on, which had set people talking.

Hurd nodded, and said nothing. He was not disposed to be communicative on the subject of his employment at the Court.

"An' it be true as she be goin' to marry Muster Raeburn?"

Patton jerked his head towards the right, where above a sloping hedge the chimneys of Mellor and the tops of the Mellor cedars, some two or three fields away, showed distinct against the deep night blue.

Hurd nodded again, and smoked diligently. Patton, nettled by this parsimony of speech, made the inward comment that his companion was "a deep un." The village was perfectly aware of the particular friendship shown by Miss Boyce to the Hurds. He was goaded into trying a more stinging topic.

"Westall wor braggin' last night at Bradsell's"—(Bradsell was the landlord of "The Green Man" at Mellor)—"ee said as how they'd taken you on at the Court—but that didn't prevent 'em knowin' as you was a bad lot. Ee said ee 'ad 'is eye on yer—ee 'ad warned yer twoice last year—"

"That's a lie!" said Hurd, removing his pipe an instant and putting it back again.

Patton looked more cheerful.

"Well, ee spoke cru'l. Ee was certain, ee said, as you could tell a thing or two about them coverts at Tudley End, if the treuth were known. You wor allus a loafer, an' a loafer you'd be. Yer might go snivellin' to Miss Boyce, ee said, but yer wouldn't do no honest work—ee said—not if yer could help it—that's what ee said."

"Devil!" said Hurd between his teeth, with a quick lift of all his great misshapen chest. He took his pipe out of his mouth, rammed it down fiercely with his thumb, and put it in his pocket.

"Look out!" exclaimed Patton with a start.

A whistle!—clear and distinct—from the opposite side of the hollow. Then a man's figure, black and motionless an instant on the whitened down, with a black speck beside it; lastly, another figure higher up along the hill, in quick motion towards the first, with other specks behind it. The poachers instantly understood that it was Westall—whose particular beat lay in this part of the estate—signalling to his night watcher, Charlie Dynes, and that the two men would be on them in no time. It was the work of a few seconds to efface as far as possible the traces of their raid, to drag some thick and trailing brambles which hung near over the mouth of the hole where there had been digging, to catch up the ferrets and game, and to bid Hurd's lurcher to come to heel. The two men crawled up the ditch with their burdens as far away to leeward as they could get from the track by which the keepers would cross the field. The ditch was deeply overgrown, and when the approaching voices warned them to lie close, they crouched under a dense thicket of brambles and overhanging bushes, afraid of nothing but the noses of the keepers' dogs.

Dogs and men, however, passed unsuspecting.

"Hold still!" said Hurd, checking Patton's first attempt to move. "He'll be back again mos' like. It's 'is dodge."

And sure enough in twenty minutes or so the men reappeared. They retraced their steps from the further corner of the field, where some preserves of Lord Maxwell's approached very closely to the big Mellor wood, and came back again along the diagonal path within fifty yards or so of the men in the ditch.

In the stillness the poachers could hear Westall's harsh and peremptory voice giving some orders to his underling, or calling to the dogs, who had scattered a little in the stubble. Hurd's own dog quivered beside him once or twice.

Then steps and voices faded into the distance and all was safe.

The poachers crept out grinning, and watched the keepers' progress along the hill-face, till they disappeared into the Maxwell woods.

"Ee be sold again—blast 'im!" said Hurd, with a note of quite disproportionate exultation in his queer, cracked voice. "Now I'll set them snares. But you'd better git home."

Patton took the hint, gave a grunt of thanks as his companion handed him two rabbits, which he stowed away in the capacious pockets of his poacher's coat, and slouched off home by as sheltered and roundabout a way as possible.

Hurd, left to himself, stowed his nets and other apparatus in a hidden crevice of the bank, and strolled along to set his snares in three hare-runs, well known to him, round the further side of the wood.

Then he waited impatiently for the striking of the clock in Mellor church. The cold was bitter, but his night's work was not over yet, and he had had very good reasons for getting rid of Patton.

Almost immediately the bell rang out, the echo rolling round the bend of the hills in the frosty silence. Half-past twelve Hurd scrambled over the ditch, pushed his way through the dilapidated hedge, and began to climb the ascent of the wood. The outskirts of it were filled with a thin mixed growth of sapling and underwood, but the high centre of it was crowned by a grove of full-grown beeches, through which the moon, now at its height, was playing freely, as Hurd clambered upwards amid the dead leaves just freshly strewn, as though in yearly festival, about their polished trunks. Such infinite grace and strength in the line work of the branches!—branches not bent into gnarled and unexpected fantasies, like those of the oak, but gathered into every conceivable harmony of upward curve and sweep, rising all together, black against the silvery light, each tree related to and completing its neighbour, as though the whole wood, so finely rounded on itself and to the hill, were but one majestic conception of a master artist.

But Hurd saw nothing of this as he plunged through the leaves. He was thinking that it was extremely likely a man would be on the look-out for him to-night under the big beeches—a man with some business to propose to him. A few words dropped in his ear at a certain public-house the night before had seemed to him to mean this, and he had accordingly sent Patton out of the way.

But when he got to the top of the hill no one was to be seen or heard, and he sat him down on a fallen log to smoke and wait awhile.

He had no sooner, however, taken his seat than he shifted it uneasily, turning himself round so as to look in the other direction. For in front of him, as he was first placed, there was a gap in the trees, and over the lower wood, plainly visible and challenging attention, rose the dark mass of Mellor House. And the sight of Mellor suggested reflections just now that were not particularly agreeable to Jim Hurd.

He had just been poaching Mr. Boyce's rabbits without any sort of scruple. But the thought of Miss Boyce was not pleasant to him when he was out on these nightly raids.

Why had she meddled? He bore her a queer sort of grudge for it. He had just settled down to the bit of cobbling which, together with his wife's plait, served him for a blind, and was full of a secret excitement as to various plans he had in hand for "doing" Westall, combining a maximum of gain for the winter with a maximum of safety, when Miss Boyce walked in, radiant with the news that there was employment for him at the Court, on the new works, whenever he liked to go and ask for it.

And then she had given him an odd look.

"And I was to pass you on a message from Lord Maxwell, Hurd," she had said: "'You tell him to keep out of Westall's way for the future, and bygones shall be bygones.' Now, I'm not going to ask what that means. If you've been breaking some of our landlords' law, I'm not going to say I'm shocked. I'd alter the law to-morrow, if I could!—you know I would. But I do say you're a fool if you go on with it, now you've got good work for the winter; you must please remember your wife and children."

And there he had sat like a log, staring at her—both he and Minta not knowing where to look, or how to speak. Then at last his wife had broken out, crying:

"Oh, miss! we should ha starved—"

And Miss Boyce had stopped her in a moment, catching her by the hand. Didn't she know it? Was she there to preach to them? Only Hurd must promise not to do it any more, for his wife's sake.

And he—stammering—left without excuse or resource, either against her charge, or the work she offered him—had promised her, and promised her, moreover—in his trepidation—with more fervency than he at all liked to remember.

For about a fortnight, perhaps, he had gone to the Court by day, and had kept indoors by night. Then, just as the vagabond passions, the Celtic instincts, so long repressed, so lately roused, were goading at him again, he met Westall in the road—Westall, who looked him over from top to toe with an insolent smile, as much as to say, "Well, my man, we've got the whip hand of you now!" That same night he crept out again in the dark and the early morning, in spite of all Minta's tears and scolding.

Well, what matter? As towards the rich and the law, he had the morals of the slave, who does not feel that he has had any part in making the rules he is expected to keep, and breaks them when he can with glee. It made him uncomfortable, certainly, that Miss Boyce should come in and out of their place as she did, should be teaching Willie to read, and bringing her old dresses to make up for Daisy and Nellie, while he was making a fool of her in this way. Still he took it all as it came. One sensation wiped out another.

Besides, Miss Boyce had, after all, much part in this double life of his. Whenever he was at home, sitting over the fire with a pipe, he read those papers and things she had brought him in the summer. He had not taken much notice of them at first. Now he spelled them out again and again. He had always thought "them rich people took advantage of yer." But he had never supposed, somehow, they were such thieves, such mean thieves, as it appeared, they were. A curious ferment filled his restless, inconsequent brain. The poor were downtrodden, but they were coming to their rights. The land and its creatures were for the people! not for the idle rich. Above all, Westall was a devil, and must be put down. For the rest, if he could have given words to experience, he would have said that since he began to go out poaching he had burst his prison and found himself. A life which was not merely endurance pulsed in him. The scent of the night woods, the keenness of the night air, the tracks and ways of the wild creatures, the wiles by which he slew them, the talents and charms of his dog Bruno—these things had developed in him new aptitudes both of mind and body, which were in themselves exhilaration. He carried his dwarf's frame more erect, breathed from an ampler chest. As for his work at the Court, he thought of it often with impatience and disgust. It was a more useful blind than his cobbling, or he would have shammed illness and got quit of it.

"Them were sharp uns that managed that business at Tudley End!" He fell thinking about it and chuckling over it as he smoked. Two of Westall's best coverts swept almost clear just before the big shoot in November!—and all done so quick and quiet, before you could say "Jack Robinson." Well, there was plenty more yet, more woods, and more birds. There were those coverts down there, on the Mellor side of the hollow—they had been kept for the last shoot in January. Hang him! why wasn't that fellow up to time?

But no one came, and he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack across his shoulders. As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink. Mists of Celtic melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him. He found himself glancing from side to side, troubled by the noises in the wood. A sad light wind crept about the trunks like a whisper; the owls called overhead; sometimes there was a sudden sharp rustle or fall of a branch that startled him. Yet he knew every track, every tree in that wood. Up and down that field outside he had followed his father at the plough, a little sickly object of a lad, yet seldom unhappy, so long as childhood lasted, and his mother's temper could be fled from, either at school or in the fields. Under that boundary hedge to the right he had lain stunned and bleeding all a summer afternoon, after old Westall had thrashed him, his heart scorched within him by the sense of wrong and the craving for revenge. On that dim path leading down the slope of the wood, George Westall had once knocked him down for disturbing a sitting pheasant. He could see himself falling—the tall, powerful lad standing over him with a grin.

Then, inconsequently, he began to think of his father's death. He made a good end did the old man. "Jim, my lad, the Lord's verra merciful," or "Jim, you'll look after Ann." Ann was the only daughter. Then a sigh or two, and a bit of sleep, and it was done.

And everybody must go the same way, must come to the same stopping of the breath, the same awfulness—in a life of blind habit—of a moment that never had been before and never could be again? He did not put it to these words, but the shudder that is in the thought for all of us, seized him. He was very apt to think of dying, to ponder in his secret heart how it would be, and when. And always it made him very soft towards Minta and the children. Not only did the life instinct cling to them, to the warm human hands and faces hemming him in and protecting him from that darkness beyond with its shapes of terror. But to think of himself as sick, and gasping to his end, like his father, was to put himself back in his old relation to his wife, when they were first married. He might cross Minta now, but if he came to lie sick, he could see himself there, in the future, following her about with his eyes, and thanking her, and doing all she told him, just as he'd used to do. He couldn't die without her to help him through. The very idea of her being taken first, roused in him a kind of spasm—a fierceness, a clenching of the hands. But all the same, in this poaching matter, he must have, his way, and she must just get used to it.

Ah! a low whistle from the further side of the wood. He replied, and was almost instantly joined by a tall slouching youth, by day a blacksmith's apprentice at Gairsley, the Maxwells' village, who had often brought him information before.

The two sat talking for ten minutes or so on the log. Then they parted; Hurd went back to the ditch where he had left the game, put two rabbits into his pockets, left the other two to be removed in the morning when he came to look at his snares, and went off home, keeping as much as possible in the shelter of the hedges. On one occasion he braved the moonlight and the open field, rather than pass through a woody corner where an old farmer had been found dead some six years before. Then he reached a deep lane leading to the village, and was soon at his own door.

As he climbed the wooden ladder leading to the one bedroom where he, his wife, and his four children slept, his wife sprang up in bed.

"Jim, you must be perished—such a night as 't is. Oh, Jim—where ha' you bin?"

She was a miserable figure in her coarse nightgown, with her grizzling hair wild about her, and her thin arms nervously outstretched along the bed. The room was freezing cold, and the moonlight stealing through the scanty bits of curtains brought into dismal clearness the squalid bed, the stained walls, and bare uneven floor. On an iron bedstead, at the foot of the large bed, lay Willie, restless and coughing, with the elder girl beside him fast asleep; the other girl lay beside her mother, and the wooden box with rockers, which held the baby, stood within reach of Mrs. Hurd's arm.

He made her no answer, but went to look at the coughing boy, who had been in bed for a week with bronchitis.

"You've never been and got in Westall's way again?" she said anxiously. "It's no good my tryin' to get a wink o' sleep when you're out like this."

"Don't you worrit yourself," he said to her, not roughly, but decidedly.
"I'm all right. This boy's bad, Minta."

"Yes, an' I kep' up the fire an' put the spout on the kettle, too." She pointed to the grate and to the thin line of steam, which was doing its powerless best against the arctic cold of the room.

Hurd bent over the boy and tried to put him comfortable. The child, weak and feverish, only began to cry—a hoarse bronchial crying, which threatened to wake the baby. He could not be stopped, so Hurd made haste to take off his own coat and boots, and then lifted the poor soul in his arms.

"You'll be quiet, Will, and go sleep, won't yer, if daddy takes keer on you?"

He wrapped his own coat round the little fellow, and lying down beside his wife, took him on his arm and drew the thin brown blankets over himself and his charge. He himself was warm with exercise, and in a little while the huddling creatures on either side of him were warm too. The quick, panting breath of the boy soon showed that he was asleep. His father, too, sank almost instantly into deep gulfs of sleep. Only the wife—nervous, overdone, and possessed by a thousand fears—lay tossing and wakeful hour after hour, while the still glory of the winter night passed by.

CHAPTER II.

"Well, Marcella, have you and Lady Winterbourne arranged your classes?"

Mrs. Boyce was stooping over a piece of needlework beside a window in the Mellor drawing-room, trying to catch the rapidly failing light. It was one of the last days of December. Marcella had just come in from the village rather early, for they were expecting a visitor to arrive about tea time, and had thrown herself, tired, into a chair near her mother.

"We have got about ten or eleven of the younger women to join; none of the old ones will come," said Marcella. "Lady Winterbourne has heard of a capital teacher from Dunstable, and we hope to get started next week. There is money enough to pay wages for three months."

In spite of her fatigue, her eye was bright and restless. The energy of thought and action from which she had just emerged still breathed from every limb and feature.

"Where have you got the money?"

"Mr. Raeburn has managed it," said Marcella, briefly.

Mrs. Boyce gave a slight shrug of the shoulders.

"And afterwards—what is to become of your product?"

"There is a London shop Lady Winterbourne knows will take what we make if it turns out well. Of course, we don't expect to pay our way."

Marcella gave her explanations with a certain stiffness of self-defence. She and Lady Winterbourne had evolved a scheme for reviving and improving the local industry of straw-plaiting, which after years of decay seemed now on the brink of final disappearance. The village women who could at present earn a few pence a week by the coarser kinds of work were to be instructed, not only in the finer and better paid sorts, but also in the making up of the plait when done, and the "blocking" of hats and bonnets—processes hitherto carried on exclusively at one or two large local centres.

"You don't expect to pay your way?" repeated Mrs. Boyce. "What, never?"

"Well, we shall give twelve to fourteen shillings a week wages. We shall find the materials, and the room—and prices are very low, the whole trade depressed."

Mrs. Boyce laughed.

"I see. How many workers do you expect to get together?"

"Oh! eventually, about two hundred in the three villages. It will regenerate the whole life!" said Marcella, a sudden ray from the inner warmth escaping her, against her will.

Mrs. Boyce smiled again, and turned her work so as to see it better.

"Does Aldous understand what you are letting him in for?"

Marcella flushed.

"Perfectly. It is 'ransom'—that's all."

"And he is ready to take your view of it?"

"Oh, he thinks us economically unsound, of course," said Marcella, impatiently. "So we are. All care for the human being under the present state of things is economically unsound. But he likes it no more than I do."

"Well, lucky for you he has a long purse," said Mrs. Boyce, lightly. "But I gather, Marcella, you don't insist upon his spending it all on straw-plaiting. He told me yesterday he had taken the Hertford Street house."