Chapter IX…

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."

"We shall live quite simply," said Marcella, quickly.

"What, no carriage?"

Marcella hesitated.

"A carriage saves time. And if one goes about much, it does not cost so much more than cabs."

"So you mean to go about much? Lady Winterbourne talks to me of presenting you in May."

"That's Miss Raeburn," cried Marcella. "She says I must, and all the family would be scandalised if I didn't go. But you can't imagine--"

She stopped and took off her hat, pushing the hair back from her forehead. A look of worry and excitement had replaced the radiant glow of her first resting moments.

"That you like it?" said Mrs. Boyce, bluntly. "Well, I don't know. Most young women like pretty gowns, and great functions, and prominent positions. I don't call you an ascetic, Marcella."

Marcella winced.

"One has to fit oneself to circumstances," she said proudly. "One may hate the circumstances, but one can't escape them."

"Oh, I don't think you will hate your circumstances, my dear! You would be very foolish if you did. Have you heard finally how much the settlement is to be?"

"No," said Marcella, shortly. "I have not asked papa, nor anybody."

"It was only settled this morning. Your father told me hurriedly as he went out. You are to have two thousand a year of your own."

The tone was dry, and the speaker's look as she turned towards her daughter had in it a curious hostility; but Marcella did not notice her mother's manner.

"It is too much," she said in a low voice.

She had thrown back her head against the chair in which she sat, and her half-troubled eyes were wandering over the darkening expanse of lawn and avenue.

"He said he wished you to feel perfectly free to live your own life, and to follow out your own projects. Oh, for a person of projects, my dear, it is not so much. You will do well to husband it. Keep it for yourself. Get what you want out of it: not what other people want."

Again Marcella's attention missed the note of agitation in her mother's sharp manner. A soft look--a look of compunction--passed across her face. Mrs. Boyce began to put her working things away, finding it too dark to do any more.

"By the way," said the mother, suddenly, "I suppose you will be going over to help him in his canvassing this next few weeks? Your father says the election will be certainly in February."

Marcella moved uneasily.

"He knows," she said at last, "that I don't agree with him in so many things. He is so full of this Peasant Proprietors Bill. And I hate peasant properties. They are nothing but a step backwards."

Mrs. Boyce lifted her eyebrows.

"That's unlucky. He tells me it is likely to be his chief work in the new Parliament. Isn't it, on the whole, probable that he knows more about the country than you do, Marcella?"

Marcella sat up with sudden energy and gathered her walking things together.

"It isn't knowledge that's the question, mamma; it's the principle of the thing. I mayn't know anything, but the people whom I follow know. There are the two sides of thought--the two ways of looking at things. I warned Aldous when he asked me to marry him which I belonged to. And he accepted it."

Mrs. Boyce's thin fine mouth curled a little.

"So you suppose that Aldous had his wits about him on that great occasion as much as you had?"

Marcella first started, then quivered with nervous indignation.

"Mother," she said, "I can't bear it. It's not the first time that you have talked as though I had taken some unfair advantage--made an unworthy bargain. It is too hard too. Other people may think what they like, but that you--"

Her voice failed her, and the tears came into her eyes. She was tired and over-excited, and the contrast between the atmosphere of flattery and consideration which surrounded her in Aldous's company, in the village, or at the Winterbournes, and this tone which her mother so often took with her when they were alone, was at the moment hardly to be endured.

Mrs. Boyce looked up more gravely.

"You misunderstand me, my dear," she said quietly. "I allow myself to wonder at you a little, but I think no hard things of you ever. I believe you like Aldous."

"Really, mamma!" cried Marcella, half hysterically.

Mrs. Boyce had by now rolled up her work and shut her workbasket.

"If you are going to take off your things," she said, "please tell William that there will be six or seven at tea. You said, I think, that Mr. Raeburn was going to bring Mr. Hallin?"

"Yes, and Frank Leven is coming. When will Mr. Wharton be here?"

"Oh, in ten minutes or so, if his train is punctual. I hear your father just coming in."

Marcella went away, and Mrs. Boyce was left a few minutes alone. Her thin hands lay idle a moment on her lap, and leaning towards the window beside her, she looked out an instant into the snowy twilight. Her mind was full of its usual calm scorn for those--her daughter included--who supposed that the human lot was to be mended by a rise in weekly wages, or that suffering has any necessary dependence on the amount of commodities of which a man disposes. What hardship is there in starving and scrubbing and toiling? Had she ever seen a labourer's wife scrubbing her cottage floor without envy, without moral thirst? Is it these things that kill, or any of the great simple griefs and burdens? Doth man live by bread alone? The whole language of social and charitable enthusiasm often raised in her a kind of exasperation.

So Marcella would be rich, excessively rich, even now. Outside the amount settled upon her, the figures of Aldous Raeburn's present income, irrespective of the inheritance which would come to him on his grandfather's death, were a good deal beyond what even Mr. Boyce--upon whom the daily spectacle of the Maxwell wealth exercised a certain angering effect--had supposed.

Mrs. Boyce had received the news of the engagement with astonishment, but her after-acceptance of the situation had been marked by all her usual philosophy. Probably behind the philosophy there was much secret relief. Marcella was provided for. Not the fondest or most contriving mother could have done more for her than she had at one stroke done for herself. During the early autumn Mrs. Boyce had experienced some moments of sharp prevision as to what her future relations might be towards this strong and restless daughter, so determined to conquer a world her mother had renounced. Now all was clear, and a very shrewd observer could allow her mind to play freely with the ironies of the situation.

As to Aldous Raeburn, she had barely spoken to him before the day when Marcella announced the engagement, and the lover a few hours later had claimed her daughter at the mother's hands with an emotion to which Mrs. Boyce found her usual difficulty in responding. She had done her best, however, to be gracious and to mask her surprise that he should have proposed, that Lord Maxwell should have consented, and that Marcella should have so lightly fallen a victim. One surprise, however, had to be confessed, at least to herself. After her interview with her future son-in-law, Mrs. Boyce realised that for the first time for fifteen years she was likely to admit a new friend. The impression made upon him by her own singular personality had translated itself in feelings and language which, against her will as it were, established an understanding, an affinity. That she had involuntarily aroused in him the profoundest and most chivalrous pity was plain to her. Yet for the first time in her life she did not resent it; and Marcella watched her mother's attitude with a mixture of curiosity and relief.

Then followed talk of an early wedding, communications from Lord Maxwell to Mr. Boyce of a civil and formal kind, a good deal more notice from the "county," and finally this definite statement from Aldous Raeburn as to the settlement he proposed to make upon his wife, and the joint income which he and she would have immediately at their disposal.

Under all these growing and palpable evidences of Marcella's future wealth and position, Mrs. Boyce had shown her usual restless and ironic spirit. But of late, and especially to-day, restlessness had become oppression. While Marcella was so speedily to become the rich and independent woman, they themselves, Marcella's mother and father, were very poor, in difficulties even, and likely to remain so. She gathered from her husband's grumbling that the provision of a suitable trousseau for Marcella would tax his resources to their utmost. How long would it be before they were dipping in Marcella's purse? Mrs. Boyce's self-tormenting soul was possessed by one of those nightmares her pride had brought upon her in grim succession during these fifteen years. And this pride, strong towards all the world, was nowhere so strong or so indomitable, at this moment, as towards her own daughter. They were practically strangers to each other; and they jarred. To inquire where the fault lay would have seemed to Mrs. Boyce futile.

* * * * *

Darkness had come on fast, and Mrs. Boyce was in the act of ringing for lights when her husband entered.

"Where's Marcella?" he asked as he threw himself into a chair with the air of irritable fatigue which was now habitual to him.

"Only gone to take off her things and tell William about tea. She will be down directly."

"Does she know about that settlement?"

"Yes, I told her. She thought it generous, but not--I think--unsuitable. The world cannot be reformed on nothing."

"Reformed!--fiddlesticks!" said Mr. Boyce, angrily. "I never saw a girl with a head so full of nonsense in my life. Where does she get it from? Why did you let her go about in London with those people? She may be spoilt for good. Ten to one she'll make a laughing stock of herself and everybody belonging to her, before she's done."

"Well, that is Mr. Raeburn's affair. I think I should take him into account more than Marcella does, if I were she. But probably she knows best."

"Of course she does. He has lost his head; any one can see that. While she is in the room, he is like a man possessed. It doesn't sit well on that kind of fellow. It makes him ridiculous. I told him half the settlement would be ample. She would only spend the rest on nonsense."

"You told him that?"

"Yes, I did. Oh!"--with an angry look at her--"I suppose you thought I should want to sponge upon her? I am as much obliged to you as usual!"

A red spot rose in his wife's thin cheek. But she turned and answered him gently, so gently that he had the rare sensation of having triumphed over her. He allowed himself to be mollified, and she stood there over the fire, chatting with him for some time, a friendly natural note in her voice which was rare and, insensibly, soothed him like an opiate. She chatted about Marcella's trousseau gowns, detailing her own contrivances for economy; about the probable day of the wedding, the latest gossip of the election, and so on. He sat shading his eyes from the firelight, and now and then throwing in a word or two. The inmost soul of him was very piteous, harrowed often by a new dread--the dread of dying. The woman beside him held him in the hollow of her hand. In the long wrestle between her nature and his, she had conquered. His fear of her and his need of her had even come to supply the place of a dozen ethical instincts he was naturally without.

Some discomfort, probably physical, seemed at last to break up his moment of rest.

"Well, I tell you, I often wish it were the other man," he said, with some impatience. "Raeburn 's so d----d superior. I suppose I offended him by what I said of Marcella's whims, and the risk of letting her control so much money at her age, and with her ideas. You never saw such an air!--all very quiet, of course. He buttoned his coat and got up to go, as though I were no more worth considering than the table. Neither he nor his precious grandfather need alarm themselves: I shan't trouble them as a visitor. If I shock them, they bore me--so we're quits. Marcella'll have to come here if she wants to see her father. But owing to your charming system of keeping her away from us all her childhood, she's not likely to want."

"You mean Mr. Wharton by the other man?" said Mrs. Boyce, not defending herself or Aldous.

"Yes, of course. But he came on the scene just too late, worse luck! Why wouldn't he have done just as well? He's as mad as she--madder. He believes all the rubbish she does--talks such rot, the people tell me, in his meetings. But then he's good company--he amuses you--you don't need to be on your p's and q's with him. Why wouldn't she have taken up with him? As far as money goes they could have rubbed along. He's not the man to starve when there are game-pies going. It's just bad luck."

Mrs. Boyce smiled a little.

"What there is to make you suppose that she would have inclined to him, I don't exactly see. She has been taken up with Mr. Raeburn, really, from the first week of her arrival here."

"Well, I dare say--there was no one else," said her husband, testily. "That's natural enough. It's just what I say. All I know is, Wharton shall be free to use this house just as he pleases during his canvassing, whatever the Raeburns may say."

He bent forward and poked the somewhat sluggish fire with a violence which hindered rather than helped it. Mrs. Boyce's smile had quite vanished. She perfectly understood all that was implied, whether in his instinctive dislike of Aldous Raeburn, or in his cordiality towards young Wharton.

After a minute's silence, he got up again and left the room, walking, as she observed, with difficulty. She stopped a minute or so in the same place after he had gone, turning her rings absently on her thin fingers. She was thinking of some remarks which Dr. Clarke, the excellent and experienced local doctor, had made to her on the occasion of his last visit. With all the force of her strong will she had set herself to disbelieve them. But they had had subtle effects already. Finally she too went upstairs, bidding Marcella, whom she met coming down, hurry William with the tea, as Mr. Wharton might arrive any moment.

* * * * *

Marcella saw the room shut up--the large, shabby, beautiful room--the lamps brought in, fresh wood thrown on the fire to make it blaze, and the tea-table set out. Then she sat herself down on a low chair by the fire, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her. Her black dress revealed her fine full throat and her white wrists, for she had an impatience of restraint anywhere, and wore frills and falls of black lace where other people would have followed the fashion in high collars and close wristbands. What must have struck any one with an observant eye, as she sat thus, thrown into beautiful light and shade by the blaze of the wood fire, was the massiveness of the head compared with the nervous delicacy of much of the face, the thinness of the wrist, and of the long and slender foot raised on the fender. It was perhaps the great thickness and full wave of the hair which gave the head its breadth; but the effect was singular, and would have been heavy but for the glow of the eyes, which balanced it.

She was thinking, as a fiancée should, of Aldous and their marriage, which had been fixed for the end of February. Yet not apparently with any rapturous absorption. There was a great deal to plan, and her mind was full of business. Who was to look after her various village schemes while she and Lady Winterbourne were away in London? Mary Harden had hardly brains enough, dear little thing as she was. They must find some capable woman and pay her. The Cravens would tell her, of course, that she was on the high road to the most degrading of rôles--the rôle of Lady Bountiful. But there were Lady Bountifuls and Lady Bountifuls. And the rôle itself was inevitable. It all depended upon how it was managed--in the interest of what ideas.

She must somehow renew her relations with the Cravens in town. It would certainly be in her power now to help them and their projects forward a little. Of course they would distrust her, but that she would get over.

All the time she was listening mechanically for the hall door bell, which, however, across the distances of the great rambling house it was not easy to hear. Their coming guest was not much in her mind. She tacitly assumed that her father would look after him. On the two or three occasions when they had met during the last three months, including his luncheon at Mellor on the day after her engagement, her thoughts had been too full to allow her to take much notice of him--picturesque and amusing as he seemed to be. Of late he had not been much in the neighbourhood. There had been a slack time for both candidates, which was now to give way to a fresh period of hard canvassing in view of the election which everybody expected at the end of February.

But Aldous was to bring Edward Hallin! That interested her. She felt an intense curiosity to see and know Hallin, coupled with a certain nervousness. The impression she might be able to make on him would be in some sense an earnest of her future.

Suddenly, something undefinable--a slight sound, a current of air--made her turn her head. To her amazement she saw a young man in the doorway looking at her with smiling eyes, and quietly drawing off his gloves.

She sprang up with a feeling of annoyance.

"Mr. Wharton!"

"Oh!--must you?"--he said, with a movement of one hand, as though to stop her. "Couldn't you stay like that? At first I thought there was nobody in the room. Your servant is grappling with my bags, which are as the sand of the sea for multitude, so I wandered in by myself. Then I saw you--and the fire--and the room. It was like a bit of music. It was mere wanton waste to interrupt it."

Marcella flushed, as she very stiffly shook hands with him.

"I did not hear the front door," she said coldly. "My mother will be here directly. May I give you some tea?"

"Thanks. No, I knew you did not hear me. That delighted me. It showed what charming things there are in the world that have no spectators! What a delicious place this is!--what a heavenly old place--especially in these half lights! There was a raw sun when I was here before, but now--"

He stood in front of the fire, looking round the great room, and at the few small lamps making their scanty light amid the flame-lit darkness. His hands were loosely crossed behind his back, and his boyish face, in its setting of curls, shone with content and self-possession.

"Well," said Marcella, bluntly, "I should prefer a little more light to live by. Perhaps, when you have fallen downstairs here in the dark as often as I have, you may too."

He laughed.

"But how much better, after all--don't you think so?--to have too little of anything than too much!"

He flung himself into a chair beside the tea-table, looking up with gay interrogation as Marcella handed him his cup. She was a good deal surprised by him. On the few occasions of their previous meetings, these bright eyes, and this pronounced manner, had been--at any rate as towards herself--much less free and evident. She began to recover the start he had given her, and to study him with a half-unwilling curiosity.

"Then Mellor will please you," she said drily, in answer to his remark, carrying her own tea meanwhile to a chair on the other side of the fire. "My father never bought anything--my father can't. I believe we have chairs enough to sit down upon--but we have no curtains to half the windows. Can I give you anything?"

For he had risen, and was looking over the tea-tray.

"Oh! but I must," he said discontentedly. "I must have enough sugar in my tea!"

"I gave you more than the average," she said, with a sudden little leap of laughter, as she came to his aid. "Do all your principles break down like this? I was going to suggest that you might like some of that fire taken away?" And she pointed to the pile of blazing logs which now filled up the great chimney.

"That fire!" he said, shivering, and moving up to it. "Have you any idea what sort of a wind you keep up here on these hills on a night like this? And to think that in this weather, with a barometer that laughs in your face when you try to move it, I have three meetings to-morrow night!"

"When one loves the 'People,' with a large P," said Marcella, "one mustn't mind winds."

He flashed a smile at her, answering to the sparkle of her look, then applied himself to his tea and toasted bun again, with the dainty deliberation of one enjoying every sip and bite.

"No; but if only the People didn't live so far apart. Some murderous person wanted them to have only one neck. I want them to have only one ear. Only then unfortunately everybody would speak well--which would bring things round to dulness again. Does Mr. Raeburn make you think very bad things of me, Miss Boyce?"

He bent forward to her as he spoke, his blue eyes all candour and mirth.

Marcella started.

"How can he?" she said abruptly. "I am not a Conservative."

"Not a Conservative?" he said joyously. "Oh! but impossible! Does that mean that you ever read my poor little speeches?"

He pointed to the local newspaper, freshly cut, which lay on a table at Marcella's elbow.

"Sometimes--" said Marcella, embarrassed. "There is so little time."

In truth she had hardly given his candidature a thought since the day Aldous proposed to her. She had been far too much taken up with her own prospects, with Lady Winterbourne's friendship, and her village schemes.

He laughed.

"Of course there is. When is the great event to be?"

"I didn't mean that," said Marcella, stiffly. "Lady Winterbourne and I have been trying to start some village workshops. We have been working and talking, and writing, morning, noon, and night."

"Oh! I know--yes, I heard of it. And you really think anything is going to come out of finicking little schemes of that sort?"

His dry change of tone drew a quick look from her. The fresh-coloured face was transformed. In place of easy mirth and mischief, she read an acute and half contemptuous attention.

"I don't know what you mean," she said slowly, after a pause. "Or rather--I do know quite well. You told papa--didn't you?--and Mr. Raeburn says that you are a Socialist--not half-and-half, as all the world is, but the real thing? And of course you want great changes: you don't like anything that might strengthen the upper class with the people. But that is nonsense. You can't get the changes for a long long time. And, meanwhile, people must be clothed and fed and kept alive."

She lay back in her high-backed chair and looked at him defiantly. His lip twitched, but he kept his gravity.

"You would be much better employed in forming a branch of the Agricultural Union," he said decidedly. "What is the good of playing Lady Bountiful to a decayed industry? All that is childish; we want the means of revolution. The people who are for reform shouldn't waste money and time on fads."

"I understand all that," she said scornfully, her quick breath rising and falling. "Perhaps you don't know that I was a member of the Venturist Society in London? What you say doesn't sound very new to me!"

His seriousness disappeared in laughter. He hastily put down his cup and, stepping over to her, held out his hand.

"You a Venturist? So am I. Joy! Won't you shake hands with me, as comrades should? We are a very mixed set of people, you know, and between ourselves I don't know that we are coming to much. But we can make an alderman dream of the guillotine--that is always something. Oh! but now we can talk on quite a new footing!"

She had given him her hand for an instant, withdrawing it with shy rapidity, and he had thrown himself into a chair again, with his arms behind his head, and the air of one reflecting happily on a changed situation. "Quite a new footing," he repeated thoughtfully. "But it is--a little surprising. What does--what does Mr. Raeburn say to it?"

"Nothing! He cares just as much about the poor as you or I, please understand! He doesn't choose my way--but he won't interfere with it."

"Ah! that is like him--like Aldous."

Marcella started.

"You don't mind my calling him by his Christian name sometimes? It drops out. We used to meet as boys together at the Levens. The Levens are my cousins. He was a big boy, and I was a little one. But he didn't like me. You see--I was a little beast!"

His air of appealing candour could not have been more engaging.

"Yes, I fear I was a little beast. And he was, even then, and always, 'the good and beautiful.' You don't understand Greek, do you, Miss Boyce? But he was very good to me. I got into an awful scrape once. I let out a pair of eagle owls that used to be kept in the courtyard--Sir Charles loved them a great deal more than his babies--I let them out at night for pure wickedness, and they came to fearful ends in the park. I was to have been sent home next day, in the most unnecessary and penal hurry. But Aldous interposed--said he would look after me for the rest of the holidays."

"And then you tormented him?"

"Oh no!" he said with gentle complacency. "Oh no! I never torment anybody. But one must enjoy oneself you know; what else can one do? Then afterwards, when we were older--somehow I don't know--but we didn't get on. It is very sad--I wish he thought better of me."

The last words were said with a certain change of tone, and sitting up he laid the tips of his fingers together on his knees with a little plaintive air. Marcella's eyes danced with amusement, but she looked away from him to the fire, and would not answer.

"You don't help me out. You don't console me. It's unkind of-you. Don't you think it a melancholy fate to be always admiring the people who detest you?"

"Don't admire them!" she said merrily.

His eyebrows lifted. "That," he said drily, "is disloyal. I call--I call your ancestor over the mantelpiece"--he waved his hand towards a blackened portrait in front of him--"to witness, that I am all for admiring Mr. Raeburn, and you discourage it. Well, but now--now"--he drew his chair eagerly towards hers, the pose of a minute before thrown to the winds--"do let us understand each other a little more before people come. You know I have a labour newspaper?"

She nodded.

"You read it?"

"Is it the Labour Clarion? I take it in."

"Capital!" he cried. "Then I know now why I found a copy in the village here. You lent it to a man called Hurd?"

"I did."

"Whose wife worships you?--whose good angel you have been? Do I know something about you, or do I not? Well, now, are you satisfied with that paper? Can you suggest to me means of improving it? It wants some fresh blood, I think--I must find it? I bought the thing last year, in a moribund condition, with the old staff. Oh! we will certainly take counsel together about it--most certainly! But first--I have been boasting of knowing something about you--but I should like to ask--do you know anything about me?"

Both laughed. Then Marcella tried to be serious.

"Well--I--I believe--you have some land?"

"Eight!" he nodded--"I am a Lincolnshire landowner. I have about five thousand acres--enough to be tolerably poor on--and enough to play tricks with. I have a co-operative farm, for instance. At present I have lent them a goodish sum of money--and remitted them their first half-year's rent. Not so far a paying speculation. But it will do--some day. Meanwhile the estate wants money--and my plans and I want money--badly. I propose to make the Labour Clarion pay--if I can. That will give me more time for speaking and organising, for what concerns us--as Venturists--than the Bar."

"The Bar?" she said, a little mystified, but following every word with a fascinated attention.

"I made myself a barrister three years ago, to please my mother. She thought I should do better in Parliament--if ever I got in. Did you ever hear of my mother?"

There was no escaping these frank, smiling questions.

"No," said Marcella, honestly.

"Well, ask Lord Maxwell," he said, laughing. "He and she came across each other once or twice, when he was Home Secretary years ago, and she was wild about some woman's grievance or other. She always maintains that she got the better of him--no doubt he was left with a different impression. Well--my mother--most people thought her mad--perhaps she was--but then somehow--I loved her!"

He was still smiling, but at the last words a charming vibration crept into the words, and his eyes sought her with a young open demand for sympathy.

"Is that so rare?" she asked him, half laughing--instinctively defending her own feeling lest it should be snatched from her by any make-believe.

"Yes--as we loved each other--it is rare. My father died when I was ten. She would not send me to school, and I was always in her pocket--I shared all her interests. She was a wild woman--but she lived, as not one person in twenty lives."

Then he sighed. Marcella was too shy to imitate his readiness to ask questions. But she supposed that his mother must be dead--indeed, now vaguely remembered to have heard as much.

There was a little silence.

"Please tell me," she said suddenly, "why do you attack my straw-plaiting? Is a co-operative farm any less of a stopgap?"

Instantly his face changed. He drew up his chair again beside her, as gay and keen-eyed as before.

"I can't argue it out now. There is so much to say. But do listen! I have a meeting in the village here next week to preach land nationalisation. We mean to try and form a branch of the Labourers' Union. Will you come?"

Marcella hesitated.

"I think so," she said slowly.

There was a pause. Then she raised her eyes and found his fixed upon her. A sudden sympathy--of youth, excitement, pleasure--seemed to rise between them. She had a quick impression of lightness, grace; of an open brow set in curls; of a look more intimate, inquisitive, commanding, than any she had yet met.

"May I speak to you, miss?" said a voice at the door.

Marcella rose hastily. Her mother's maid was standing there.

She hurried across the room.

"What is the matter, Deacon?"

"Your mother says, miss," said the maid, retreating into the hall, "I am to tell you she can't come down. Your father is ill, and she has sent for Dr. Clarke. But you are please not to go up. Will you give the gentlemen their tea, and she will come down before they go, if she can."

Marcella had turned pale.

"Mayn't I go, Deacon? What is it?"

"It's a bad fit of pain, your mother says, miss. Nothing can be done till the doctor comes. She begged particular that you wouldn't go up, miss. She doesn't want any one put out."

At the same moment there was a ring at the outer door.

"Oh, there is Aldous," cried Marcella, with relief, and she ran out into the hall to meet him.

Chapter III

Aldous advanced into the inner hall at sight of Marcella, leaving his companions behind in the vestibule taking off their coats. Marcella ran to him.

"Papa is ill!" she said to him hastily. "Mamma has sent for Dr. Clarke. She won't let me go up, and wants us to take no notice and have tea without her."

"I am so sorry! Can we do anything? The dogcart is here with a fast horse. If your messenger went on foot--"

"Oh, no! they are sure to have sent the boy on the pony. I don't know why, but I have had a presentiment for a long time past that papa was going to be ill."

She looked white and excited. She had turned back to the drawing-room, forgetting the other guests, he walking beside her. As they passed along the dim hall, Aldous had her hand close in his, and when they passed under an archway at the further end he stooped suddenly in the shadows and kissed the hand. Touch--kiss--had the clinging, the intensity of passion.

They were the expression of all that had lain vibrating at the man's inmost heart during the dark drive, while he had been chatting with his two companions.

"My darling! I hope not. Would you rather not see strangers? Shall I send Hallin and young Leven away? They would understand at once."

"Oh, no! Mr. Wharton is here anyway--staying. Where is Mr. Hallin? I had forgotten him."

Aldous turned and called. Mr. Hallin and young Frank Leven, divining something unusual, were looking at the pictures in the hall.

Edward Hallin came up and took Marcella's offered hand. Each looked at the other with a special attention and interest. "She holds my friend's life in her hands--is she worthy of it?" was naturally the question hanging suspended in the man's judgment. The girl's manner was proud and shy, the manner of one anxious to please, yet already, perhaps, on the defensive.

Aldous explained the position of affairs, and Hallin expressed his sympathy. He had a singularly attractive voice, the voice indeed of the orator, which can adapt itself with equal charm and strength to the most various needs and to any pitch. As he spoke, Marcella was conscious of a sudden impression that she already knew him and could be herself with him at once.

"Oh, I say," broke in young Leven, who was standing behind; "don't you be bothered with us, Miss Boyce. Just send us back at once. I'm awfully sorry!"

"No; you are to come in!" she said, smiling through her pallor, which was beginning to pass away, and putting out her hand to him--the young Eton and Oxford athlete, just home for his Christmas vacation, was a great favourite with her--"You must come and have tea and cheer me up by telling me all the things you have killed this week. Is there anything left alive? You had come down to the fieldfares, you know, last Tuesday."

He followed her, laughing and protesting, and she led the way to the drawing-room. But as her fingers were on the handle she once more caught sight of the maid, Deacon, standing on the stairs, and ran to speak to her.

"He is better," she said, coming back with a face of glad relief. "The attack seems to be passing off. Mamma can't come down, but she begs that we will all enjoy ourselves."

"We'll endeavour," said young Leven, rubbing his hands, "by the help of tea. Miss Boyce, will you please tell Aldous and Mr. Hallin not to talk politics when they're taking me out to a party. They should fight a man of their own size. I'm all limp and trampled on, and want you to protect me."

The group moved, laughing and talking, into the drawing-room.

"Jiminy!" said Leven, stopping short behind Aldous, who was alone conscious of the lad's indignant astonishment; "what the deuce is he doing here?"

For there on the rug, with his back to the fire, stood Wharton, surveying the party with his usual smiling aplomb.

"Mr. Hallin, do you know Mr. Wharton?" said Marcella.

"Mr. Wharton and I have met several times on public platforms," said Hallin, holding out his hand, which Wharton took with effusion. Aldous greeted him with the impassive manner, the "three finger" manner, which was with him an inheritance--though not from his grandfather--and did not contribute to his popularity in the neighbourhood. As for young Leven, he barely nodded to the Radical candidate, and threw himself into a chair as far from the fire as possible.

"Frank and I have met before to-day!" said Wharton, laughing.

"Yes, I've been trying to undo some of your mischief," said the boy, bluntly. "I found him, Miss Boyce, haranguing a lot of men at the dinner-hour at Tudley End--one of our villages, you know--cramming them like anything--all about the game laws, and our misdeeds--my father's, of course."

Wharton raised a protesting hand.

"Oh--all very well! Of course it was us you meant! Well, when he'd driven off, I got up on a cart and had my say. I asked them whether they didn't all come out at our big shoots, and whether they didn't have almost as much fun as we did--why! the schoolmaster and the postman come to ask to carry cartridges, and everybody turns out, down to the cripples!--whether they didn't have rabbits given them all the year round; whether half of them hadn't brothers and sons employed somehow about the game, well-paid, and well-treated; whether any man-jack of them would be a ha'porth better off if there were no game; whether many of them wouldn't be worse off; and whether England wouldn't be a beastly dull place to live in, if people like him"--he pointed to Wharton--"had the governing of it! And I brought 'em all round too. I got them cheering and laughing. Oh! I can tell you old Dodgson'll have to take me on. He says he'll ask me to speak for him at several places. I'm not half bad, I declare I'm not."

"I thought they gave you a holiday task at Eton," observed Wharton, blandly.

The lad coloured hotly, then bethought himself--radiant:--

"I left Eton last half, as of course you know quite well. But if it had only been last Christmas instead of this, wouldn't I have scored--by Jove! They gave us a beastly essay instead of a book. Demagogues!' I sat up all night, and screwed out a page and a half. I'd have known something about it now."

And as he stood beside the tea-table, waiting for Marcella to entrust some tea to him for distribution, he turned and made a profound bow to his candidate cousin.

Everybody joined in the laugh, led by Wharton. Then there was a general drawing up of chairs, and Marcella applied herself to making tea, helped by Aldous. Wharton alone remained standing before the fire, observant and apart.

Hallin, whose health at this moment made all exertion, even a drive, something of a burden, sat a little away from the tea-table, resting, and glad to be silent. Yet all the time he was observing the girl presiding and the man beside her--his friend, her lover. The moment had a peculiar, perhaps a melancholy interest for him. So close had been the bond between himself and Aldous, that the lover's communication of his engagement had evoked in the friend that sense--poignant, inevitable--which in the realm of the affections always waits on something done and finished,--a leaf turned, a chapter closed. "That sad word, Joy!" Hallin was alone and ill when Raeburn's letter reached him, and through the following day and night he was haunted by Landor's phrase, long familiar and significant to him. His letter to his friend, and the letter to Miss Boyce for which Raeburn had asked him, had cost him an invalid's contribution of sleep and ease. The girl's answer had seemed to him constrained and young, though touched here and there with a certain fineness and largeness of phrase, which, if it was to be taken as an index of character, no doubt threw light upon the matter so far as Aldous was concerned.

Her beauty, of which he had heard much, now that he was face to face with it, was certainly striking enough--all the more because of its immaturity, the subtlety and uncertainty of its promise. Immaturity--uncertainty--these words returned upon him as he observed her manner with its occasional awkwardness, the awkwardness which goes with power not yet fully explored or mastered by its possessor. How Aldous hung upon her, following every movement, anticipating every want! After a while Hallin found himself half-inclined to Mr. Boyce's view, that men of Raeburn's type are never seen to advantage in this stage--this queer topsy-turvy stage--of first passion. He felt a certain impatience, a certain jealousy for his friend's dignity. It seemed to him too, every now and then, that she--the girl--was teased by all this absorption, this deference. He was conscious of watching for something in her that did not appear; and a first prescience of things anxious or untoward stirred in his quick sense.

"You may all say what you like," said Marcella, suddenly, putting down her cup, and letting her hand drop for emphasis on her knee; "but you will never persuade me that game-preserving doesn't make life in the country much more difficult, and the difference between classes much wider and bitterer, than they need be."

The remark cut across some rattling talk of Frank Leven's, who was in the first flush of the sportsman's ardour, and, though by no means without parts, could at the present moment apply his mind to little else than killing of one kind or another, unless it were to the chances of keeping his odious cousin out of Parliament.

Leven stared. Miss Boyce's speech seemed to him to have no sort of à propos. Aldous looked down upon her as he stood beside her, smiling.

"I wish you didn't trouble yourself so much about it," he said.

"How can I help it?" she answered quickly; and then flushed, like one who has drawn attention indiscreetly to their own personal situation.

"Trouble herself!" echoed young Leven. "Now, look here Miss Boyce, will you come for a walk with me? I'll convince you, as I convinced those fellows over there. I know I could, and you won't give me the chance; it's too bad."

"Oh, you!" she said, with a little shrug; "what do you know about it? One might as well consult a gambler about gambling when he is in the middle of his first rush of luck. I have ten times more right to an opinion than you have. I can keep my head cool, and notice a hundred things that you would never see. I come fresh into your country life, and the first thing that strikes me is that the whole machinery of law and order seems to exist for nothing in the world but to protect your pheasants! There are policemen--to catch poachers; there are magistrates--to try them. To judge from the newspapers, at least, they have nothing else to do. And if you follow your sporting instincts, you are a very fine fellow, and everybody admires you. But if a shoemaker's son in Mellor follows his, he is a villain and a thief, and the policeman and the magistrate make for him at once."

"But I don't steal his chickens!" cried the lad, choking with arguments and exasperation; "and why should he steal my pheasants? I paid for the eggs, I paid for the hens to sit on 'em, I paid for the coops to rear them in, I paid the men to watch them, I paid for the barley to feed them with: why is he to be allowed to take my property, and I am to be sent to jail if I take his?"

"Property!" said Marcella, scornfully. "You can't settle everything nowadays by that big word. We are coming to put the public good before property. If the nation should decide to curtail your 'right,' as you call it, in the general interest, it will do it, and you will be left to scream."

She had flung her arm round the back of her chair, and all her lithe young frame was tense with an eagerness, nay, an excitement, which drew Hallin's attention. It was more than was warranted by the conversation, he thought.

"Well, if you think the abolition of game preserving would be popular in the country, Miss Boyce, I'm certain you make a precious mistake," cried Leven. "Why, even you don't think it would be, do you, Mr. Hallin?" he said, appealing at random in his disgust.

"I don't know," said Hallin, with his quiet smile. "I rather think, on the whole, it would be. The farmers put up with it, but a great many of them don't like it. Things are mended since the Ground Game Act, but there are a good many grievances still left."

"I should think there are!" said Marcella, eagerly, bending forward to him. "I was talking to one of our farmers the other day whose land goes up to the edge of Lord Winterbourne's woods. 'They don't keep their pheasants, miss,' he said. 'I do. I and my corn. If I didn't send a man up half-past five in the morning, when the ears begin to fill, there'd be nothing left for us.' 'Why don't you complain to the agent?' I said. 'Complain! Lor' bless you, miss, you may complain till you're black in the face. I've allus found--an' I've been here, man and boy, thirty-two year--as how Winterbournes generally best it.' There you have the whole thing in a nutshell. It's a tyranny--a tyranny of the rich."

Flushed and sarcastic, she looked at Frank Leven; but Hallin had an uncomfortable feeling that the sarcasm was not all meant for him. Aldous was sitting with his hands on his knees, and his head bent forward a little. Once, as the talk ran on, Hallin saw him raise his grey eyes to the girl beside him, who certainly did not notice it, and was not thinking of him. There was a curious pain and perplexity in the expression, but something else too--a hunger, a dependence, a yearning, that for an instant gripped the friend's heart.

"Well, I know Aldous doesn't agree with you, Miss Boyce," cried Leven, looking about him in his indignation for some argument that should be final. "You don't, do you, Aldous? You don't think the country would be the better, if we could do away with game to-morrow?"

"No more than I think it would be the better," said Aldous, quietly, "if we could do away with gold-plate and false hair to-morrow. There would be too many hungry goldsmiths and wig-makers on the streets."

Marcella turned to him, half defiant, half softened.

"Of course, your point lies in to-morrow," she said. "I accept that. We can't carry reform by starving innocent people. But the question is, what are we to work towards? Mayn't we regard the game laws as one of the obvious crying abuses to be attacked first--in the great campaign!--the campaign which is to bring liberty and self-respect back to the country districts, and make the labourer feel himself as much of a man as the squire?"

"What a head! What an attitude!" thought Hallin, half repelled, half fascinated. "But a girl that can talk politics--hostile politics--to her lover, and mean them too--or am I inexperienced?--and is it merely that she is so much interested in him that she wants to be quarrelling with him?"

Aldous looked up. "I am not sure," he said, answering her. "That is always my difficulty, you know," and he smiled at her. "Game preserving is not to me personally an attractive form of private property, but it seems to me bound up with other forms, and I want to see where the attack is going to lead me. But I would protect your farmer--mind!--as zealously as you."

Hallin caught the impatient quiver of the girl's lip. The tea had just been taken away, and Marcella had gone to sit upon an old sofa near the fire, whither Aldous had followed her. Wharton, who had so far said nothing, had left his post of observation on the hearth-rug, and was sitting under the lamp balancing a paper-knife with great attention on two fingers. In the half light Hallin by chance saw a movement of Raeburn's hand towards Marcella's, which lay hidden among the folds of her dress--quick resistance on her part, then acquiescence. He felt a sudden pleasure in his friend's small triumph.

"Aldous and I have worn these things threadbare many a time," he said, addressing his hostess. "You don't know how kind he is to my dreams. I am no sportsman and have no landowning relations, so he ought to bid me hold my tongue. But he lets me rave. To me the simple fact is that game preserving creates crime. Agricultural life is naturally simpler--might be, it always seems to me, so much more easily moralised and fraternised than the industrial form. And you split it up and poison it all by the emphasis laid on this class pleasure. It is a natural pleasure, you say. Perhaps it is--the survival, perhaps, of some primitive instinct in our northern blood--but, if so, why should it be impossible for the rich to share it with the poor? I have little plans--dreams. I throw them out sometimes to catch Aldous, but he hardly rises to them!"

"Oh! I say," broke in Frank Leven, who could really bear it no longer. "Now look here, Miss Boyce,--what do you think Mr. Hallin wants? It is just sheer lunacy--it really is--though I know I'm impertinent, and he's a great man. But I do declare he wants Aldous to give up a big common there is--oh! over beyond Girtstone, down in the plain--on Lord Maxwell's estate, and make a labourers' shoot of it! Now, I ask you! And he vows he doesn't see why they shouldn't rear pheasants if they choose to club and pay for it. Well, I will say that much for him, Aldous didn't see his way to that, though he isn't the kind of Conservative I want to see in Parliament by a long way. Besides, it's such stuff! They say sport brutalises us, and then they want to go and contaminate the labourer. But we won't take the responsibility. We've got our own vices, and we'll stick to them; we're used to them; but we won't hand them on: we'd scorn the action."

The flushed young barbarian, driven to bay, was not to be resisted. Marcella laughed heartily, and Hallin laid an affectionate hand on the boy's shoulder, patting him as though he were a restive horse.

"Yes, I remember I was puzzled as to the details of Hallin's scheme," said Aldous, his mouth twitching. "I wanted to know who was to pay for the licences; how game enough for the number of applicants was to be got without preserving; and how men earning twelve or fourteen shillings a week were to pay a keeper. Then I asked a clergyman who has a living near this common what he thought would be the end of it. 'Well,' he said, 'the first day they'd shoot every animal on the place; the second day they'd shoot each other. Universal carnage--I should say that would be about the end of it.' These were trifles, of course--details."

Hallin shook his head serenely.

"I still maintain," he said, "that a little practical ingenuity might have found a way."

"And I will support you," said Wharton, laying down the paper-knife and bending over to Hallin, "with good reason. For three years and a few months just such an idea as you describe has been carried out on my own estate, and it has not worked badly at all."

"There!" cried Marcella. "There! I knew something could be done, if there was a will. I have always felt it."

She half turned to Aldous, then bent forward instead as though listening eagerly for what more Wharton might say, her face all alive, and eloquent.

"Of course, there was nothing to shoot!" exclaimed Frank Leven.

"On the contrary," said Wharton, smiling, "we are in the middle of a famous partridge country."

"How your neighbours must dote on you!" cried the boy. But Wharton took no notice.

"And my father preserved strictly," he went on. "It is quite a simple story. When I inherited, three years ago, I thought the whole thing detestable, and determined I wouldn't be responsible for keeping it up. So I called the estate together--farmers and labourers--and we worked out a plan. There are keepers, but they are the estate servants, not mine. Everybody has his turn according to the rules--I and my friends along with the rest. Not everybody can shoot every year, but everybody gets his chance, and, moreover, a certain percentage of all the game killed is public property, and is distributed every year according to a regular order."

"Who pays the keepers?" interrupted Leven.

"I do," said Wharton, smiling again. "Mayn't I--for the present--do what I will with mine own? I return in their wages some of my ill-gotten gains as a landowner. It is all makeshift, of course."

"I understand!" exclaimed Marcella, nodding to him--"you could not be a Venturist and keep up game-preserving?"

Wharton met her bright eye with a half deprecating, reserved air.

"You are right, of course," he said drily. "For a Socialist to be letting his keepers run in a man earning twelve shillings a week for knocking over a rabbit would have been a little strong. No one can be consistent in my position--in any landowner's position--it is impossible; still, thank Heaven, one can deal with the most glaring matters. As Mr. Raeburn said, however, all this game business is, of course, a mere incident of the general land and property system, as you will hear me expound when you come to that meeting you promised me to honour."

He stooped forward, scanning her with smiling deference. Marcella felt the man's hand that held her own suddenly tighten an instant. Then Aldous released her, and rising walked towards the fire.

"You're not going to one of his meetings, Miss Boyce!" cried Frank, in angry incredulity.

Marcella hesitated an instant, half angry with Wharton. Then she reddened and threw back her dark head with the passionate gesture Hallin had already noticed as characteristic.

"Mayn't I go where I belong?" she said--"where my convictions lead me?"

There was a moment's awkward silence. Then Hallin got up.

"Miss Boyce, may we see the house? Aldous has told me much of it."

* * * * *

Presently, in the midst of their straggling progress through the half-furnished rooms of the garden front, preceded by the shy footman carrying a lamp, which served for little more than to make darkness visible, Marcella found herself left behind with Aldous. As soon as she felt that they were alone, she realised a jar between herself and him. His manner was much as usual, but there was an underlying effort and difficulty which her sensitiveness caught at once. A sudden wave of girlish trouble--remorse--swept over her. In her impulsiveness she moved close to him as they were passing through her mother's little sitting-room, and put her hand on his arm.

"I don't think I was nice just now," she said, stammering. "I didn't mean it. I seem to be always driven into opposition--into a feeling of war--when you are so good to me--so much too good to me!"

Aldous had turned at her first word. With a long breath, as it were of unspeakable relief, he caught her in his arms vehemently, passionately. So far she had been very shrinking and maidenly with him in their solitary moments, and he had been all delicate chivalry and respect, tasting to the full the exquisiteness of each fresh advance towards intimacy, towards lover's privilege, adoring her, perhaps, all the more for her reserve, her sudden flights, and stiffenings. But to-night he asked no leave, and in her astonishment she was almost passive.

"Oh, do let me go!" she cried at last, trying to disengage herself completely.

"No!" he said with emphasis, still holding her hand firmly. "Come and sit down here. They will look after themselves."

He put her, whether she would or no, into an arm-chair and knelt beside her.

"Did you think it was hardly kind," he said with a quiver of voice he could not repress, "to let me hear for the first time, in public, that you had promised to go to one of that man's meetings after refusing again and again to come to any of mine?"

"Do you want to forbid me to go?" she said quickly. There was a feeling in her which would have been almost relieved, for the moment, if he had said yes.

"By no means," he said steadily. "That was not our compact. But--guess for yourself what I want! Do you think"--he paused a moment--"do you think I put nothing of myself into my public life--into these meetings among the people who have known me from a boy? Do you think it is all a convention--that my feeling, my conscience, remain outside? You can't think that! But if not, how can I bear to live what is to be so large a part of my life out of your ken and sight? I know--I know--you warned me amply--you can't agree with me. But there is much besides intellectual agreement possible--much that would help and teach us both--if only we are together--not separated--not holding aloof--"

He stopped, watching all the changes of her face. She was gulfed in a deep wave of half-repentant feeling, remembering all his generosity, his forbearance, his devotion.

"When are you speaking next?" she half whispered. In the dim light her softened pose, the gentle sudden relaxation of every line, were an intoxication.

"Next week--Friday--at Gairsly. Hallin and Aunt Neta are coming."

"Will Miss Raeburn take me?"

His grey eyes shone upon her, and he kissed her hand.

"Mr. Hallin won't speak for you!" she said, after the silence, with a return of mischief.

"Don't be so sure! He has given me untold help in the drafting of my Bill. If I didn't call myself a Conservative, he would vote for me to-morrow. That's the absurdity of it. Do you know, I hear them coming back?"

"One thing," she said hastily, drawing him towards her, and then holding him back, as though shrinking always from the feeling she could so readily evoke. "I must say it; you oughtn't to give me so much money, it is too much. Suppose I use it for things you don't like?"

"You won't," he said gaily.

She tried to push the subject further, but he would not have it.

"I am all for free discussion," he said in the same tone; "but sometimes debate must be stifled. I am going to stifle it!"

And stooping, he kissed her, lightly, tremulously. His manner showed her once more what she was to him--how sacred, how beloved. First it touched and shook her; then she sprang up with a sudden disagreeable sense of moral disadvantage--inferiority--coming she knew not whence, and undoing for the moment all that buoyant consciousness of playing the magnanimous, disinterested part which had possessed her throughout the talk in the drawing-room.

The others reappeared, headed by their lamp: Wharton first, scanning the two who had lingered behind, with his curious eyes, so blue and brilliant under the white forehead and the curls.

"We have been making the wildest shots at your ancestors, Miss Boyce," he said. "Frank professed to know everything about the pictures, and turned out to know nothing. I shall ask for some special coaching to-morrow morning. May I engage you--ten o'clock?"

Marcella made some evasive answer, and they all sauntered back to the drawing-room.

"Shall you be at work to-morrow, Raeburn?" said Wharton.

"Probably," said Aldous drily. Marcella, struck by the tone, looked back, and caught an expression and bearing which were as yet new to her in the speaker. She supposed they represented the haughtiness natural in the man of birth and power towards the intruder, who is also the opponent.

Instantly the combative critical mood returned upon her, and the impulse to assert herself by protecting Wharton. His manner throughout the talk in the drawing-room had been, she declared to herself, excellent--modest, and self-restrained, comparing curiously with the boyish egotism and self-abandonment he had shown in their tête-à-tête.

* * * * *

"Why, there is Mr. Boyce," exclaimed Wharton, hurrying forward as they entered the drawing-room.

There, indeed, on the sofa was the master of the house, more ghastly black and white than ever, and prepared to claim to the utmost the tragic pre-eminence of illness. He shook hands coldly with Aldous, who asked after his health with the kindly brevity natural to the man who wants no effusions for himself in public or personal matters, and concludes therefore that other people desire none.

"You are better, papa?" said Marcella, taking his hand.

"Certainly, my dear--better for morphia. Don't talk of me. I have got my death warrant, but I hope I can take it quietly. Evelyn, I specially asked to have that thin cushion brought down from my dressing-room. It is strange that no one pays any attention to my wants."

Mrs. Boyce, almost as white, Marcella now saw, as her husband, moved forward from the fire, where she had been speaking to Hallin, took a cushion from a chair near, exactly similar to the one he missed, and changed his position a little.

"It is just the feather's weight of change that makes the difference, isn't it?" said Wharton, softly, sitting down beside the invalid.

Mr. Boyce turned a mollified countenance upon the speaker, and being now free from pain, gave himself up to the amusement of hearing his guest talk. Wharton devoted himself, employing all his best arts.

"Dr. Clarke is not anxious about him," Mrs. Boyce said in a low voice to Marcella as they moved away. "He does not think the attack will return for a long while, and he has given me the means of stopping it if it does come back."

"How tired you look!" said Aldous, coming up to them, and speaking in the same undertone. "Will you not let Marcella take you to rest?"

He was always deeply, unreasonably touched by any sign of stoicism, of defied suffering in women. Mrs. Boyce had proved it many times already. On the present occasion she put his sympathy by, but she lingered to talk with him. Hallin from a distance noticed first of all her tall thinness and fairness, and her wonderful dignity of carriage; then the cordiality of her manner to her future son-in-law. Marcella stood by listening, her young shoulders somewhat stiffly set. Her consciousness of her mother's respect and admiration for the man she was to marry was, oddly enough, never altogether pleasant to her. It brought with it a certain discomfort, a certain wish to argue things out.

Hallin and Aldous parted with Frank Leven at Mellor gate, and turned homeward together under a starry heaven already whitening to the coming moon.

"Do you know that man Wharton is getting an extraordinary hold upon the London working men?" said Hallin. "I have heard him tell that story of the game-preserving before. He was speaking for one of the Radical candidates at Hackney, and I happened to be there. It brought down the house. The rôle of your Socialist aristocrat, of your land-nationalising landlord, is a very telling one."

"And comparatively easy," said Aldous, "when you know that neither Socialism nor land-nationalisation will come in your time!"

"Oh! so you think him altogether a windbag?"

Aldous hesitated and laughed.

"I have certainly no reason to suspect him of principles. His conscience as a boy was of pretty elastic stuff."

"You may be unfair to him," said Hallin, quickly. Then, after a pause: "How long is he staying at Mellor?"

"About a week, I believe," said Aldous, shortly. "Mr. Boyce has taken a fancy to him."

They walked on in silence, and then Aldous turned to his friend in distress.

"You know, Hallin, this wind is much too cold for you. You are the most wilful of men. Why would you walk?"

"Hold your tongue, sir, and listen to me. I think your Marcella is beautiful, and as interesting as she is beautiful. There!"

Aldous started, then turned a grateful face upon him.

"You must get to know her well," he said, but with some constraint.

"Of course. I wonder," said Hallin, musing, "whom she has got hold of among the Venturists. Shall you persuade her to come out of that, do you think, Aldous?"

"No!" said Raeburn, cheerfully. "Her sympathies and convictions go with them."

Then, as they passed through the village, he began to talk of quite other things--college friends, a recent volume of philosophical essays, and so on. Hallin, accustomed and jealously accustomed as he was to be the one person in the world with whom Raeburn talked freely, would not to-night have done or said anything to force a strong man's reserve. But his own mind was full of anxiety.

Chapter IV

"I love this dilapidation!" said Wharton, pausing for a moment with his back against the door he had just shut. "Only it makes me long to take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other--plastering, or carpentering, or painting. What useless drones we upper classes are! Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor--to save our lives."

They were in the disused library. It was now the last room westwards of the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to her English husband's birthplace. The roof had been raised and domed to match the "Chinese room," at the expense of some small rooms on the upper floor; and the windows and doors had been suited to eighteenth-century taste. But the old books in the old latticed shelves which the Puritan founder of the family had bought in the days of the Long Parliament were still there; so were the chairs in which that worthy had sat to read a tract of Milton's or of Baxter's, or the table at which he had penned his letters to Hampden or Fairfax, or to his old friend--on the wrong side--Edmund Verney the standard-bearer. Only the worm-eaten shelves were dropping from their supports, and the books lay in mouldy confusion; the roofs had great holes and gaps, whence the laths hung dismally down, and bats came flitting in the dusk; and there were rotten places in the carpetless floor.

"I have tried my best," said Marcella, dolefully, stooping to look at a hole in the floor. "I got a bit of board and some nails, and tried to mend some of these places myself. But I only broke the rotten wood away; and papa was angry, and said I did more harm than good. I did get a carpenter to mend some of the chairs; but one doesn't know where to begin. I have cleaned and mended some of the books, but--"

She looked sadly round the musty, forlorn place.

"But not so well, I am afraid, as any second-hand bookseller's apprentice could have done it," said Wharton, shaking his head. "It's maddening to think what duffers we gentlefolks are!"

"Why do you harp on that?" said Marcella, quickly. She had been taking him over the house, and was in twenty minds again as to whether and how much she liked him.

"Because I have been reading some Board of Trade reports before breakfast," said Wharton, "on one or two of the Birmingham industries in particular. Goodness! what an amount of knowledge and skill and resource these fellows have that I go about calling the 'lower orders.' I wonder how long they are going to let me rule over them!"

"I suppose brain-power and education count for something still?" said Marcella, half scornfully.

"I am greatly obliged to the world for thinking so," said Wharton with emphasis, "and for thinking so about the particular kind of brain-power I happen to possess, which is the point. The processes by which a Birmingham jeweller makes the wonderful things which we attribute to 'French taste' when we see them in the shops of the Rue de la Paix are, of course, mere imbecility--compared to my performances in Responsions. Lucky for me, at any rate, that the world has decided it so. I get a good time of it--and the Birmingham jeweller calls me 'sir.'"

"Oh! the skilled labour! that can take care of itself, and won't go on calling you 'sir' much longer. But what about the unskilled--the people here for instance--the villagers? We talk of their governing themselves; we wish it, and work for it. But which of us really believes that they are fit for it, or that they are ever going to get along without our brain-power?"

"No--poor souls!" said Wharton, with a peculiar vibrating emphasis. "'By their stripes we are healed, by their death we have lived.' Do you remember your Carlyle?"

They had entered one of the bays formed by the bookcases which on either side of the room projected from the wall at regular intervals, and were standing by one of the windows which looked out on the great avenue. Beside the window on either side hung a small portrait--in the one case of an elderly man in a wig, in the other of a young, dark-haired woman.

"Plenty in general, but nothing in particular," said Marcella, laughing. "Quote."

He was leaning against the angle formed by the wall and the bookcase. The half-serious, half-provocative intensity of his blue eyes under the brow which drooped forward contrasted with the careless, well-appointed ease of his general attitude and dress.

"'Two men I honour, and no third,'" he said, quoting in a slightly dragging, vibrating voice: "'First, the toil-worn craftsman that with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her man's.--Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred.' Heavens! how the words swing! But it is great nonsense, you know, for you and me--Venturists--to be maundering like this. Charity--benevolence--that is all Carlyle is leading up to. He merely wants the cash nexus supplemented by a few good offices. But we want something much more unpleasant! 'Keep your subscriptions--hand over your dividends--turn out of your land--and go to work!' Nowadays society is trying to get out of doing what we want, by doing what Carlyle wanted."

"Do you want it?" said Marcella.

"I don't know," he said, laughing. "It won't come in our time."

Her lip showed her scorn.

"That's what we all think. Meanwhile you will perhaps admit that a little charity greases the wheels."

"You must, because you are a woman; and women are made for charity--and aristocracy."

"Do you suppose you know so much about women?" she asked him, rather hotly. "I notice it is always the assumption of the people who make most mistakes."

"Oh! I know enough to steer by!" he said, smiling, with a little inclination of his curly head, as though to propitiate her. "How like you are to that portrait!"

Marcella started, and saw that he was pointing to the woman's portrait beside the window--looking from it to his hostess with a close considering eye.

"That was an ancestress of mine," she said coldly, "an Italian lady. She was rich and musical. Her money built these rooms along the garden, and these are her music books."

She showed him that the shelves against which she was leaning were full of old music.

"Italian!" he said, lifting his eyebrows. "Ah, that explains. Do you know--that you have all the qualities of a leader!"--and he moved away a yard from her, studying her--"mixed blood--one must always have that to fire and fuse the English paste--and then--but no! that won't do--I should offend you."

Her first instinct was one of annoyance--a wish to send him about his business, or rather to return him to her mother who would certainly keep him in order. Instead, however, she found herself saying, as she looked carelessly out of window--

"Oh! go on."

"Well, then"--he drew himself up suddenly and wheeled round upon her--"you have the gift of compromise. That is invaluable--that will take you far."

"Thank you!" she said. "Thank you! I know what that means--from a Venturist. You think me a mean insincere person!"

He started, then recovered himself and came to lean against the bookshelves beside her.

"I mean nothing of the sort," he said, in quite a different manner, with a sort of gentle and personal emphasis. "But--may I explain myself, Miss Boyce, in a room with a fire? I can see you shivering under your fur."

For the frost still reigned supreme outside, and the white grass and trees threw chill reflected lights into the forsaken library. Marcella controlled a pulse of excitement that had begun to beat in her, admitted that it was certainly cold, and led the way through a side door to a little flagged parlour, belonging to the oldest portion of the house, where, however, a great log-fire was burning, and some chairs drawn up round it. She took one and let the fur wrap she had thrown about her for their promenade through the disused rooms drop from her shoulders. It lay about her in full brown folds, giving special dignity to her slim height and proud head. Wharton glancing about in his curious inquisitive way, now at the neglected pictures, now on the walls, now at the old oak chairs and chests, now at her, said to himself that she was a splendid and inspiring creature. She seemed to be on the verge of offence with him too, half the time, which was stimulating. She would have liked, he thought, to play the great lady with him already, as Aldous Raeburn's betrothed. But he had so far managed to keep her off that plane--and intended to go on doing so.

"Well, I meant this," he said, leaning against the old stone chimney and looking down upon her; "only don't be offended with me, please. You are a Socialist, and you are going--some day--to be Lady Maxwell. Those combinations are only possible to women. They can sustain them, because they are imaginative--not logical."

She flushed.

"And you," she said, breathing quickly, "are a Socialist and a landlord. What is the difference?"

He laughed.

"Ah! but I have no gift--I can't ride the two horses, as you will be able to--quite honestly. There's the difference. And the consequence is that with my own class I am an outcast--they all hate me. But you will have power as Lady Maxwell--and power as a Socialist--because you will give and take. Half your time you will act as Lady Maxwell should, the other half like a Venturist. And, as I said, it will give you power--a modified power. But men are less clever at that kind of thing."

"Do you mean to say," she asked him abruptly, "that you have given up the luxuries and opportunities of your class?"

He shifted his position a little.

"That is a different matter," he said after a moment. "We Socialists are all agreed, I think, that no man can be a Socialist by himself. Luxuries, for the present, are something personal, individual. It is only a man's 'public form' that matters. And there, as I said before, I have no gift!--I have not a relation or an old friend in the world that has not turned his back upon me--as you might see for yourself yesterday! My class has renounced me already--which, after all, is a weakness."

"So you pity yourself?" she said.

"By no means! We all choose the part in life that amuses us--that brings us most thrill. I get most thrill out of throwing myself into the workmen's war--much more than I could ever get, you will admit, out of dancing attendance on my very respectable cousins. My mother taught me to see everything dramatically. We have no drama in England at the present moment worth a cent; so I amuse myself with this great tragi-comedy of the working-class movement. It stirs, pricks, interests me, from morning till night. I feel the great rough elemental passions in it, and it delights me to know that every day brings us nearer to some great outburst, to scenes and struggles at any rate that will make us all look alive. I am like a child with the best of its cake to come, but with plenty in hand already. Ah!--stay still a moment, Miss Boyce!"

To her amazement he stooped suddenly towards her; and she, looking down, saw that a corner of her light, black dress, which had been overhanging the low stone fender, was in flames, and that he was putting it out with his hands. She made a movement to rise, alarmed lest the flames should leap to her face--her hair. But he, releasing one hand for an instant from its task of twisting and rolling the skirt upon itself, held her heavily down.

"Don't move; I will have it out in a moment. You won't be burnt."

And in a second more she was looking at a ragged brown hole in her dress; and at him, standing, smiling, before the fire, and wrapping a handkerchief round some of the fingers of his left hand.

"You have burnt yourself, Mr. Wharton?"

"A little."

"I will go and get something--what would you like?"

"A little olive oil if you have some, and a bit of lint--but don't trouble yourself."

She flew to find her mother's maid, calling and searching on her way for Mrs. Boyce herself, but in vain. Mrs. Boyce had disappeared after breakfast, and was probably helping her husband to dress.

In a minute or so Marcella ran downstairs again, bearing various medicaments. She sped to the Stone Parlour, her cheek and eye glowing.

"Let me do it for you."

"If you please," said Wharton, meekly.

She did her best, but she was not skilful with her fingers, and this close contact with him somehow excited her.

"There," she said, laughing and releasing him. "Of course, if I were a work-girl I should have done it better. They are not going to be very bad, I think."

"What, the burns? Oh, no! They will have recovered, I am afraid, long before your dress."

"Oh, my dress! yes, it is deplorable. I will go and change it."

She turned to go, but she lingered instead, and said with an odd, introductory laugh:

"I believe you saved my life!"

"Well, I am glad I was here. You might have lost self-possession--even you might, you know!--and then it would have been serious."

"Anyway"--her voice was still uncertain--"I might have been disfigured--disfigured for life!"

"I don't know why you should dwell upon it now it's done with," he declared, smiling.

"It would be strange, wouldn't it, if I took it quite for granted--all in the day's work?" She held out her hand: "I am grateful--please."

He bowed over it, laughing, again with that eighteenth-century air which might have become a Chevalier des Grieux.

"May I exact a reward?"

"Ask it."

"Will you take me down with you to your village? I know you are going. I must walk on afterwards and catch a midday train to Widrington. I have an appointment there at two o'clock. But perhaps you will introduce me to one or two of your poor people first?"

Marcella assented, went upstairs, changed her dress, and put on her walking things, more than half inclined all the time to press her mother to go with them. She was a little unstrung and tremulous, pursued by a feeling that she was somehow letting herself go, behaving disloyally and indecorously towards whom?--towards Aldous? But how, or why? She did not know. But there was a curious sense of lost bloom, lost dignity, combined with an odd wish that Mr. Wharton were not going away for the day. In the end, however, she left her mother undisturbed.

By the time they were half way to the village, Marcella's uncomfortable feelings had all passed away. Without knowing it, she was becoming too much absorbed in her companion to be self-critical, so long as they were together. It seemed to her, however, before they had gone more than a few hundred yards that he was taking advantage--presuming on what had happened. He offended her taste, her pride, her dignity, in a hundred ways, she discovered. At the same time it was she who was always on the defensive--protecting her dreams, her acts, her opinions, against the constant fire of his half-ironical questions, which seemed to leave her no time at all to carry the war into the enemy's country. He put her through a quick cross-examination about the village, its occupations, the incomes of the people, its local charities and institutions, what she hoped to do for it, what she would do if she could, what she thought it possible to do. She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish. But it was no good. In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had constantly done--that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was talking about; that not only was her reading of no account, but that she had not even managed to see these people, to interpret their lives under her very eyes, with any large degree of insight.

Especially was he merciless to all the Lady Bountiful pose, which meant so much to her imagination--not in words so much as in manner. He let her see that all the doling and shepherding and advising that still pleased her fancy looked to him the merest temporary palliative, and irretrievably tainted, even at that, with some vulgar feeling or other. All that the well-to-do could do for the poor under the present state of society was but a niggardly quit-rent; as for any relation of "superior" and "inferior" in the business, or of any social desert attaching to these precious efforts of the upper class to daub the gaps in the ruinous social edifice for which they were themselves responsible, he did not attempt to conceal his scorn. If you did not do these things, so much the worse for you when the working class came to its own; if you did do them, the burden of debt was hardly diminished, and the rope was still left on your neck.

Now Marcella herself had on one or two occasions taken a malicious pleasure in flaunting these doctrines, or some of them, under Miss Raeburn's eyes. But somehow, as applied to herself, they were disagreeable. Each of us is to himself a "special case"; and she saw the other side. Hence a constant soreness of feeling; a constant recalling of the argument to the personal point of view; and through it all a curious growth of intimacy, a rubbing away of barriers. She had felt herself of no account before, intellectually, in Aldous's company, as we know. But then how involuntary on his part, and how counter-balanced by that passionate idealism of his love, which glorified every pretty impulse in her to the noblest proportions! Under Wharton's Socratic method, she was conscious at times of the most wild and womanish desires, worthy of her childhood--to cry, to go into a passion!--and when they came to the village, and every human creature, old and young, dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural relations of country life.

They went first to Mrs. Jellison's, to whom Marcella wished to unfold her workshop scheme.

"Don't let me keep you," she said to Wharton coldly, as they neared the cottage; "I know you have to catch your train."

Wharton consulted his watch. He had to be at a local station some two miles off within an hour.

"Oh! I have time," he said. "Do take me in, Miss Boyce. I have made acquaintance with these people so far, as my constituents--now show them to me as your subjects. Besides, I am an observer. I 'collect' peasants. They are my study."

"They are not my subjects, but my friends," she said with the same stiffness.

They found Mrs. Jellison having her dinner. The lively old woman was sitting close against her bit of fire, on her left a small deal table which held her cold potatoes and cold bacon; on her right a tiny window and window-sill whereon lay her coil of "plait" and the simple straw-splitting machine she had just been working. When Marcella had taken the only other chair the hovel contained, nothing else remained for Wharton but to flatten himself as closely against the door as he might.

"I'm sorry I can't bid yer take a cheer," said Mrs. Jellison to him, "but what yer han't got yer can't give, so I don't trouble my head about nothink."

Wharton applauded her with easy politeness, and then gave himself, with folded arms, to examining the cottage while Marcella talked. It might be ten feet broad, he thought, by six feet in one part and eight feet in another. The roof was within little more than an inch of his head. The stairway in the corner was falling to pieces; he wondered how the woman got up safely to her bed at night; custom, he supposed, can make even old bones agile.

Meanwhile Marcella was unfolding the project of the straw-plaiting workshop that she and Lady Winterbourne were about to start. Mrs. Jellison put on her spectacles apparently that she might hear the better, pushed away her dinner in spite of her visitors' civilities, and listened with a bright and beady eye.

"An' yer agoin' to pay me one a sixpence a score, where I now gets ninepence. And I'll not have to tramp it into town no more--you'll send a man round. And who is agoin' to pay me, miss, if you'll excuse me asking?"

"Lady Winterbourne and I," said Marcella, smiling. "We're going to employ this village and two others, and make as good business of it as we can. But we're going to begin by giving the workers better wages, and in time we hope to teach them the higher kinds of work."

"Lor'!" said Mrs. Jellison. "But I'm not one o' them as kin do with changes." She took up her plait and looked at it thoughtfully. "Eighteen-pence a score. It wor that rate when I wor a girl. An' it ha' been dibble--dibble--iver sense; a penny off here, an' a penny off there, an' a hard job to keep a bite ov anythink in your mouth."

"Then I may put down your name among our workers, Mrs. Jellison?" said Marcella, rising and smiling down upon her.

"Oh, lor', no; I niver said that," said Mrs. Jellison, hastily. "I don't hold wi' shilly-shallyin' wi' yer means o' livin'. I've took my plait to Jimmy Gedge--'im an' 'is son, fust shop on yer right hand when yer git into town--twenty-five year, summer and winter--me an' three other women, as give me a penny a journey for takin' theirs. If I wor to go messin' about wi' Jimmy Gedge, Lor' bless yer, I should 'ear ov it--oh! I shoulden sleep o' nights for thinkin' o' how Jimmy ud serve me out when I wor least egspectin' ov it. He's a queer un. No, miss, thank yer kindly; but I think I'll bide."

Marcella, amazed, began to argue a little, to expound the many attractions of the new scheme. Greatly to her annoyance, Wharton came forward to her help, guaranteeing the solvency and permanence of her new partnership in glib and pleasant phrase, wherein her angry fancy suspected at once the note of irony. But Mrs. Jellison held firm, embroidering her negative, indeed, with her usual cheerful chatter, but sticking to it all the same. At last there was no way of saving dignity but to talk of something else and go--above all, to talk of something else before going, lest the would-be benefactor should be thought a petty tyrant.

"Oh, Johnnie?--thank yer, miss--'e's an owdacious young villain as iver I seed--but clever--lor', you'd need 'ave eyes in yer back to look after 'im. An' coaxin'! ''Aven't yer brought me no sweeties, Gran'ma?' 'No, my dear,' says I. 'But if you was to look, Gran'ma--in both your pockets, Gran'ma--iv you was to let me look?' It's a sharp un Isabella, she don't 'old wi' sweet-stuff, she says, sich a pack o' nonsense. She'd stuff herself sick when she wor 'is age. Why shouldn't ee be happy, same as her? There ain't much to make a child 'appy in that 'ouse. Westall, ee's that mad about them poachers over Tudley End; ee's like a wild bull at 'ome. I told Isabella ee'd come to knockin' ov her about some day, though ee did speak so oily when ee wor a courtin'. Now she knows as I kin see a thing or two," said Mrs. Jellison, significantly. Her manner, Wharton noticed, kept always the same gay philosophy, whatever subject turned up.

"Why, that's an old story--that Tudley End business--" said Marcella, rising. "I should have thought Westall might have got over it by now."

"But bless yer, ee says it's goin' on as lively as iver. Ee says ee knows they're set on grabbin' the birds t'other side the estate, over beyond Mellor way--ee's got wind of it--an' ee's watchin' night an' day to see they don't do him no bad turn this month, bekase o' the big shoot they allus has in January. An' lor', ee do speak drefful bad o' soom folks," said Mrs. Jellison, with an amused expression. "You know some on 'em, miss, don't yer?" And the old woman, who had begun toying with her potatoes, slanted her fork over her shoulder so as to point towards the Hurds' cottage, whereof the snow-laden roof could be seen conspicuously through the little lattice beside her, making sly eyes the while at her visitor.

"I don't believe a word of it," said Marcella, impatiently. "Hurd has been in good work since October, and has no need to poach. Westall has a down on him. You may tell him I think so, if you like."

"That I will," said Mrs. Jellison, cheerfully, opening the door for them. "There's nobody makes 'im 'ear the trëuth, nobbut me. I loves naggin' ov 'im, ee's that masterful. But ee don't master me!"

"A gay old thing," said Wharton as they shut the gate behind them. "How she does enjoy the human spectacle. And obstinate too. But you will find the younger ones more amenable."

"Of course," said Marcella, with dignity. "I have a great many names already. The old people are always difficult. But Mrs. Jellison will come round."

"Are you going in here?"

"Please."

Wharton knocked at the Hurds' door, and Mrs. Hurd opened.

The cottage was thick with smoke. The chimney only drew when the door was left open. But the wind to-day was so bitter that mother and children preferred the smoke to the draught. Marcella soon made out the poor little bronchitic boy, sitting coughing by the fire, and Mrs. Hurd busied with some washing. She introduced Wharton, who, as before, stood for some time, hat in hand, studying the cottage. Marcella was perfectly conscious of it, and a blush rose to her cheek while she talked to Mrs. Hurd. For both this and Mrs. Jellison's hovel were her father's property and somewhat highly rented.

Minta Hurd said eagerly that she would join the new straw-plaiting, and went on to throw out a number of hurried, half-coherent remarks about the state of the trade past and present, leaning meanwhile against the table and endlessly drying her hands on the towel she had taken up when her visitors came in.

Her manner was often nervous and flighty in these days. She never looked happy; but Marcella put it down to health or natural querulousness of character. Yet both she and the children were clearly better nourished, except Willie, in whom the tubercular tendency was fast gaining on the child's strength.

Altogether Marcella was proud of her work, and her eager interest in this little knot of people whose lives she had shaped was more possessive than ever. Hurd, indeed, was often silent and secretive; but she put down her difficulties with him to our odious system of class differences, against which in her own way she was struggling. One thing delighted her--that he seemed to take more and more interest in the labour questions she discussed with him, and in that fervid, exuberant literature she provided him with. Moreover, he now went to all Mr. Wharton's meetings that were held within reasonable distance of Mellor; and, as she said to Aldous with a little laugh, which, however, was not unsweet, he had found her man work--she had robbed his candidate of a vote.

Wharton listened a while to her talk with Minta, smiled a little, unperceived of Marcella, at the young mother's docilities of manner and phrase; then turned his attention to the little hunched and coughing object by the fire.

"Are you very bad, little man?"

The white-faced child looked up, a dreary look, revealing a patient, melancholy soul. He tried to answer, but coughed instead.

Wharton, moving towards him, saw a bit of ragged white paper lying on the ground, which had been torn from a grocery parcel.

"Would you like something to amuse you a bit--Ugh! this smoke! Come round here, it won't catch us so much. Now, then, what do you say to a doggie,--two doggies?"

The child stared, let himself be lifted on the stranger's knee, and did his very utmost to stop coughing. But when he had succeeded his quick panting breaths still shook his tiny frame and Wharton's knee.

"Hm--Give him two months or thereabouts!" thought Wharton. "What a beastly hole!--one room up, and one down, like the other, only a shade larger. Damp, insanitary, cold--bad water, bad drainage, I'll be bound--bad everything. That girl may well try her little best. And I go making up to that man Boyce! What for? Old spites?--new spites?--which?--or both!"

Meanwhile his rapid skilful fingers were tearing, pinching, and shaping; and in a very few minutes there, upon his free knee, stood the most enticing doggie of pinched paper, a hound in full course, with long ears and stretching legs.

The child gazed at it with ravishment, put out a weird hand, touched it, stroked it, and then, as he looked back at Wharton, the most exquisite smile dawned in his saucer-blue eyes.

"What? did you like it, grasshopper?" cried Wharton, enchanted by the beauty of the look, his own colour mounting. "Then you shall have another."

And he twisted and turned his piece of fresh paper, till there, beside the first, stood a second fairy animal--a greyhound this time, with arching neck and sharp long nose.

"There's two on 'em at Westall's!" cried the child, hoarsely, clutching at his treasures in an ecstasy.

Mrs. Hurd, at the other end of the cottage, started as she heard the name. Marcella noticed it; and with her eager sympathetic look began at once to talk of Hurd and the works at the Court. She understood they were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter. Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases. "Oh! he didn't have nothing to say against it." Mr. Brown, the steward, seemed satisfied. All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella's annoyance, plaintive as usual. Wharton, with the boy inside his arm, turned his head an instant to listen.

Marcella, having thought of repeating, without names, some of Mrs. Jellison's gossip, then shrank from it. He had promised her, she thought to herself with a proud delicacy; and she was not going to treat the word of a working man as different from anybody else's.

So she fastened her cloak again, which she had thrown open in the stifling air of the cottage, and turned both to call her companion and give a smile or two to the sick boy.

But, as she did so, she stood amazed at the spectacle of Wharton and the child. Then, moving up to them, she perceived the menagerie--for it had grown to one--on Wharton's knee.

"You didn't guess I had such tricks," he said, smiling.

"But they are so good--so artistic!" She took up a little galloping horse he had just fashioned and wondered at it.

"A great-aunt taught me--she was a genius--I follow her at a long distance. Will you let me go, young man? You may keep all of them."

But the child, with a sudden contraction of the brow, flung a tiny stick-like arm round his neck, pressing hard, and looking at him. There was a red spot in each wasted cheek, and his eyes were wide and happy. Wharton returned the look with one of quiet scrutiny--the scrutiny of the doctor or the philosopher. On Marcella's quick sense the contrast of the two heads impressed itself--the delicate youth of Wharton's with its clustering curls--the sunken contours and the helpless suffering of the other. Then Wharton kissed the little fellow, put his animals carefully on to a chair beside him, and set him down.

They walked along the snowy street again, in a different relation to each other. Marcella had been touched and charmed, and Wharton teased her no more. As they reached the door of the almshouse where the old Pattons lived, she said to him: "I think I had rather go in here by myself, please. I have some things to give them--old Patton has been very ill this last week--but I know what you think of doles--and I know too what you think, what you must think, of my father's cottages. It makes me feel a hypocrite; yet I must do these things; we are different, you and I--I am sure you will miss your train!"

But there was no antagonism, only painful feeling in her softened look.

Wharton put out his hand.

"Yes, it is time for me to go. You say I make you feel a hypocrite! I wonder whether you have any idea what you make me feel? Do you imagine I should dare to say the things I have said except to one of the élite? Would it be worth my while, as a social reformer? Are you not vowed to great destinies? When one comes across one of the tools of the future, must one not try to sharpen it, out of one's poor resources, in spite of manners?"

Marcella, stirred--abashed--fascinated--let him press her hand. Then he walked rapidly away towards the station, a faint smile twitching at his lip.

"An inexperienced girl," he said to himself, composedly.