"It's no good being sullen over it," he said in exasperation; "I'm your father, and I'm dying. I have a right to question you. It's my duty to see something settled, if I can, before I go. Is it true that all the time you were attacking Raeburn about politics and the reprieve, and what not, you were really behaving as you never ought to have behaved, with Harry Wharton?"

He gave out the words with sharp emphasis, and, bending towards her, he laid an emaciated hand upon her arm.

"What use is there, papa, in going back to these things?" she said, driven to bay, her colour going and coming. "I may have been wrong in a hundred ways, but you never understood that the real reason for it all was that—that—I never was in love with Mr. Raeburn."

"Then why did you accept him?" He fell back against his pillows with a jerk.

"As to that, I will confess my sins readily enough," she said, while her lip trembled, and he saw the tears spring into her eyes. "I accepted him for what you just now called his position in the county, though not quite in that way either."

He was silent a little, then he began again in a voice which gradually became unsteady from self-pity.

"Well, now look here! I have been thinking about this matter a great deal—and God knows I've time to think and cause to think, considering the state I'm in—and I see no reason whatever why I should not try—before I die—to put this thing straight. That man was head over ears in love with you, madly in love with you. I used to watch him, and I know. Of course you offended and distressed him greatly. He could never have expected such conduct from you or any one else. But he's not the man to change round easily, or to take up with any one else. Now, if you regret what you did or the way in which you did it, why shouldn't I—a dying man may be allowed a little licence I should think!—give him a hint?"

"Papa!" cried Marcella, dropping her work, and looking at him with a pale, indignant passion, which a year ago would have quelled him utterly. But he held up his hand.

"Now just let me finish. It would be no good my doing a thing of this kind without saying something to you first, because you'd find it out, and your pride would be the ruin of it. You always had a demoniacal pride, Marcella, even when you were a tiny child; but if you make up your mind now to let me tell him you regret what you did—just that—you'll make him happy, and yourself, for you know very well he's a man of the highest character—and your poor father, who never did you much harm anyway!" His voice faltered. "I'd manage it so that there should be nothing humiliating to you in it whatever. As if there could be anything humiliating in confessing such a mistake as that; besides, what is there to be ashamed of? You're no pauper. I've pulled Mellor out of the mud for you, though you and your mother do give me credit for so precious little!"

He lay back, trembling with fatigue, yet still staring at her with glittering eyes, while his hand on the invalid table fixed to the side of his chair shook piteously. Marcella dreaded the effect the whole scene might have upon him; but, now they were in the midst of it, both feeling for herself and prudence for him drove her into the strongest speech she could devise.

"Papa, if anything of that sort were done, I should take care Mr. Raeburn knew I had had nothing to do with it—in such a way that it would be impossible for him to carry it further. Dear papa, don't think of such a thing any more. Because I treated Mr. Raeburn unjustly last year, are we now to harass and persecute him? I would sooner disappear from everybody I know—from you and mamma, from England—and never be heard of again."

She stopped a moment—struggling for composure—that she might not excite him too much.

"Besides, it would be absurd! You forget I have seen a good deal of Mr. Raeburn lately—while I have been with the Winterbournes. He has entirely given up all thought of me. Even my vanity could see that plainly enough. His best friends expect him to marry a bright, fascinating little creature of whom I saw a good deal in James Street—a Miss Macdonald."

"Miss how—much?" he asked roughly.

She repeated the name, and then dwelt, with a certain amount of confusion and repetition, upon the probabilities of the matter—half conscious all the time that she was playing a part, persuading herself and him of something she was not at all clear about in her own inner mind—but miserably, passionately determined to go through with it all the same.

He bore with what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet also half incredulous. He had always been obstinate, and the approach of death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised the bodily frame. He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some way yet of testing the matter in spite of her. He would think it out.

Meanwhile, step by step, she brought the conversation to less dangerous things, and she was finally gliding into some chat about the Winterbournes when he interrupted her abruptly—

"And that other fellow—Wharton. Your mother tells me you have seen him in London. Has he been making love to you?"

"Suppose I won't be catechised!" she said gaily, determined to allow no more tragedy of any kind. "Besides, papa, you can't read your gossip as good people should. Mr. Wharton's engagement to a certain Lady Selina Farrell—a distant cousin of the Winterbournes—was announced, in several papers with great plainness three weeks ago."

At that moment her mother came in, looking anxiously at them both, and half resentfully at Marcella. Marcella, sore and bruised in every moral fibre, got up to go.

Something in the involuntary droop of her beautiful head as she left the room drew her father's eyes after her, and for the time his feeling towards her softened curiously. Well, she had not made very much of her life so far! That old strange jealousy of her ability, her beauty, and her social place, he had once felt so hotly, died away. He wished her, indeed, to be Lady Maxwell. Yet for the moment there was a certain balm in the idea that she too—her mother's daughter—with her Merritt blood—could be unlucky.

Marcella went about all day under a vague sense of impending trouble—the result, no doubt, of that intolerable threat of her father's, against which she was, after all, so defenceless.

But whatever it was, it made her all the more nervous and sensitive about the Hallins; about her one true friend, to whom she was slowly revealing herself, even without speech; whose spiritual strength had been guiding and training her; whose physical weakness had drawn to him the maternal, the spending instincts which her nursing life had so richly developed.

She strolled down the drive to meet the post. But there were no letters from London, and she came in, inclined to be angry indeed with Louis Craven for deserting her, but saying to herself at the same time that she must have heard if anything had gone wrong.

An hour or so later, just as the October evening was closing in, she was sitting dreaming over a dim wood-fire in the drawing-room. Her father, as might have been expected, had been very tired and comatose all day. Her mother was with him; the London nurse was to sit up, and Marcella felt herself forlorn and superfluous.

Suddenly, in the silence of the house, she heard the front-door bell ring. There was a step in the hall—she sprang up—the door opened, and William, with fluttered emphasis, announced—

"Lord Maxwell!"

In the dusk she could just see his tall form—the short pause as he perceived her—then her hand was in his, and the paralysing astonishment of that first instant had disappeared under the grave emotion of his look.

"Will you excuse me," he said, "for coming at this hour? But I am afraid you have heard nothing yet of our bad news—and Hallin himself was anxious I should come and tell you. Miss Hallin could not write, and Mr. Craven, I was to tell you, had been ill for a week with a chill. You haven't then seen any account of the lecture in the papers?"

"No; I have looked yesterday and to-day in our paper, but there was nothing—"

"Some of the Radical papers reported it. I hoped you might have seen it. But when we got down here this afternoon, and there was nothing from you, both Miss Hallin and Edward felt sure you had not heard—and I walked over. It was a most painful, distressing scene, and he—is very ill."

"But you have brought him to the Court?" she said trembling, lost in the thought of Hallin, her quick breath coming and going. "He was able to bear the journey? Will you tell me?—will you sit down?"

He thanked her hurriedly, and took a seat opposite to her, within the circle of the firelight, so that she saw his deep mourning and the look of repressed suffering.

"The whole thing was extraordinary—I can hardly now describe it," he said, holding his hat in his hands and staring into the fire. "It began excellently. There was a very full room. Bennett was in the chair—and Edward seemed much as usual. He had been looking desperately ill, but he declared that he was sleeping better, and that his sister and I coddled him. Then,—directly he was well started!—I felt somehow that the audience was very hostile. And he evidently felt it more and more. There was a good deal of interruption and hardly any cheers—and I saw after a little—I was sitting not far behind him—that he was discouraged—that he had lost touch. It was presently clear, indeed, that the real interest of the meeting lay not in the least in what he had to say, but in the debate that was to follow. They meant to let him have his hour—but not a minute more. I watched the men about me, and I could see them following the clock—thirsting for their turn. Nothing that he said seemed to penetrate them in the smallest degree. He was there merely as a ninepin to be knocked over. I never saw a meeting so possessed with a madness of fanatical conviction—it was amazing!"

He paused, looking sadly before him. She made a little movement, and he roused himself instantly.

"It was just a few minutes before he was to sit down—I was thankful!—when suddenly—I heard his voice change. I do not know now what happened—but I believe he completely lost consciousness of the scene before him—the sense of strain, of exhaustion, of making no way, must have snapped something. He began a sort of confession—a reverie in public—about himself, his life, his thoughts, his prayers, his hopes—mostly his religious hopes—for the working man, for England—I never heard anything of the kind from him before—you know his reserve. It was so intimate—so painful—oh! so painful!"—he drew himself together with an involuntary shudder—"before this crowd, this eager hostile crowd which was only pining for him to sit down—to get out of their way. The men near me began to look at each other and titter. They wondered what he meant by maundering on like that—'damned canting stuff'—I heard one man near me call it. I tore off a bit of paper, and passed a line to Bennett asking him to get hold of Edward, to stop it. But I think Bennett had rather lost his presence of mind, and I saw him look back at me and shake his head. Then time was up, and they began to shout him down."

Marcella made an exclamation of horror. He turned to her.

"I think it was the most tragic scene I ever saw," he said with a feeling as simple as it was intense. "This crowd so angry and excited—without a particle of understanding or sympathy—laughing, and shouting at him—and he in the midst—white as death—talking this strange nonsense—his voice floating in a high key, quite unlike itself. At last just as I was getting up to go to him, I saw Bennett rise. But we were both too late. He fell at our feet!"

Marcella gave an involuntary sob! "What a horror!" she said, "what a martyrdom!"

"It was just that," he answered in a low voice—"It was a martyrdom. And when one thinks of the way in which for years past he has held these big meetings in the hollow of his hand, and now, because he crosses their passion, their whim,—no kindness!—no patience—nothing but a blind hostile fury! Yet they thought him a traitor, no doubt. Oh! it was all a tragedy!"

There was silence an instant. Then he resumed:

"We got him into the back room. Luckily there was a doctor on the platform. It was heart failure, of course, with brain prostration. We managed to get him home, and Susie Hallin and I sat up. He was delirious all night; but yesterday he rallied, and last night he begged us to move him out of London if we could. So we got two doctors and an invalid carriage, and by three this afternoon we were all at the Court. My aunt was ready for him—his sister is there—and a nurse. Clarke was there to meet him. He thinks he cannot possibly live more than a few weeks—possibly even a few days. The shock and strain have been irreparable."

Marcella lay back in her chair, struggling with her grief, her head and face turned away from him, her eyes hidden by her handkerchief. Then in some mysterious way she was suddenly conscious that Aldous was no longer thinking of Hallin, but of her.

"He wants very much to see you," he said, bending towards her; "but I know that you have yourself serious illness to nurse. Forgive me for not having enquired after Mr. Boyce. I trust he is better?"

She sat up, red-eyed, but mistress of herself. The tone had been all gentleness, but to her quivering sense some slight indefinable change—coldness—had passed into it.

"He is better, thank you—for the present. And my mother does not let me do very much. We have a nurse too. When shall I come?"

He rose.

"Could you—come to-morrow afternoon? There is to be a consultation of doctors in the morning, which will tire him. About six?—that was what he said. He is very weak, but in the day quite conscious and rational. My aunt begged me to say how glad she would be—"

He paused. An invincible awkwardness took possession of both of them. She longed to speak to him of his grandfather but could not find the courage.

When he was gone, she, standing alone in the firelight, gave one passionate thought to the fact that so—in this tragic way—they had met again in this room where he had spoken to her his last words as a lover; and then, steadily, she put everything out of her mind but her friend—and death.



CHAPTER II.

Mrs. Boyce received Marcella's news with more sympathy than her daughter had dared to hope for, and she made no remark upon Aldous himself and his visit, for which Marcella was grateful to her.

As they left the dining-room, after their short evening meal, to go up to Mr. Boyce, Marcella detained her mother an instant.

"Mamma, will you please not tell papa that—that Lord Maxwell came here this afternoon? And will you explain to him why I am going there to-morrow?"

Mrs. Boyce's fair cheek flushed. Marcella saw that she understood.

"If I were you, I should not let your father talk to you any more about those things," she said with a certain proud impatience.

"If I can help it!" exclaimed Marcella. "Will you tell him, mamma,—about Mr. Hallin?—and how good he has been to me?"

Then her voice failed her, and, hurriedly leaving her mother at the top of the stairs, she went away by herself to struggle with a grief and smart almost unbearable.

That night passed quietly at the Court. Hallin was at intervals slightly delirious, but less so than the night before; and in the early morning the young doctor, who had sat up with him, reported him to Aldous as calmer and a little stronger. But the heart mischief was hopeless, and might bring the bruised life to an end at any moment.

He could not, however, be kept in bed, owing to restlessness and difficulty of breathing, and by midday he was in Aldous's sitting-room, drawn close to the window, that he might delight his eyes with the wide range of wood and plain that it commanded. After a very wet September, the October days were now following each other in a settled and sunny peace. The great woods of the Chilterns, just yellowing towards that full golden moment—short, like all perfection,—which only beeches know, rolled down the hill-slopes to the plain, their curving lines cut here and there by straight fir stems, drawn clear and dark on the pale background of sky and lowland. In the park, immediately below the window, groups of wild cherry and of a slender-leaved maple made spots of "flame and amethyst" on the smooth falling lawns; the deer wandered and fed, and the squirrels were playing and feasting among the beech nuts.

Since Aldous and his poor sister had brought him home from the Bethnal Green hall in which the Land Reform Conference had been held, Hallin had spoken little, except in delirium, and that little had been marked by deep and painful depression. But this morning, when Aldous was summoned by the nurse, and found him propped up by the window, in front of the great view, he saw gracious signs of change. Death, indeed, already in possession, looked from the blue eyes so plainly that Aldous, on his first entrance, had need of all his own strength of will to keep his composure. But with the certainty of that great release, and with the abandonment of all physical and mental struggle—the struggle of a lifetime—Hallin seemed to-day to have recovered something of his characteristic serenity and blitheness—the temper which had made him the leader of his Oxford contemporaries, and the dear comrade of his friend's life.

When Aldous came in, Hallin smiled and lifted a feeble hand towards the park and the woods.

"Could it have greeted me more kindly," he said, in his whispering voice, "for the end?"

Aldous sat down beside him, pressing his hand, and there was silence till Hallin spoke again.

"You will keep this sitting-room, Aldous?"

"Always."

"I am glad. I have known you in it so long. What good talks we have had here in the old hot days! I was hot, at least, and you bore with me. Land Reform—Church Reform—Wages Reform—we have threshed them all out in this room. Do you remember that night I kept you up till it was too late to go to bed, talking over my Church plans? How full I was of it!—the Church that was to be the people—reflecting their life, their differences—governed by them—growing with them. You wouldn't join it, Aldous—our poor little Association!"

Aldous's strong lip quivered.

"Let me think of something I did join in," he said.

Hallin's look shone on him with a wonderful affection.

"Was there anything else you didn't help in? I don't remember it. I've dragged you into most things. You never minded failure. And I have not had so much of it—not till this last. This has been failure—absolute and complete."

But there was no darkening of expression. He sat quietly smiling.

"Do you suppose anybody who could look beyond the moment would dream of calling it failure?" said Aldous, with difficulty.

Hallin shook his head gently, and was silent for a little time, gathering strength and breath again.

"I ought to suffer"—he said, presently. "Last week I dreaded my own feeling if I should fail or break down—more than the failure itself. But since yesterday—last night—I have no more regrets. I see that my power is gone—that if I were to live I could no longer carry on the battle—or my old life. I am out of touch. Those whom I love and would serve, put me aside. Those who invite me, I do not care to join. So I drop—into the gulf—and the pageant rushes on. But the curious thing is now—I have no suffering. And as to the future—do you remember Jowett in the Introduction to the Phaedo—"

He feebly pointed to a book beside him, which Aldous took up. Hallin guided him and he read—

"Most persons when the last hour comes are resigned to the order of nature and the will of God. They are not thinking of Dante's 'Inferno' or 'Paradiso,' or of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Heaven and Hell are not realities to them, but words or ideas—the outward symbols of some great mystery, they hardly know what."

"It is so with me," said Hallin, smiling, as, at his gesture, Aldous laid the book aside; "yet not quite. To my mind, that mystery indeed is all unknown and dark—but to the heart it seems unveiled—with the heart, I see."

A little later Aldous was startled to hear him say, very clearly and quickly:

"Do you remember that this is the fifth of October?"

Aldous drew his chair closer, that he might not raise his voice.

"Yes, Ned."

"Two years, wasn't it, to-day? Will you forgive me if I speak of her?"

"You shall say anything you will."

"Did you notice that piece of news I sent you, in my last letter to Geneva? But of course you did. Did it please you?"

"Yes, I was glad of it," said Aldous, after a pause, "extremely glad. I thought she had escaped a great danger."

Hallin studied his face closely.

"She is free, Aldous—and she is a noble creature—she has learnt from life—and from death—this last two years. And—you still love her. Is it right to make no more effort?"

Aldous saw the perspiration standing on the wasted brow—would have given the world to be able to content or cheer him—yet would not, for the world, at such a moment be false to his own feeling or deceive his questioner.

"I think it is right," he said deliberately, "—for a good many reasons, Edward. In the first place I have not the smallest cause—not the fraction of a cause—to suppose that I could occupy with her now any other ground than that I occupied two years ago. She has been kind and friendly to me—on the whole—since we met in London. She has even expressed regret for last year—meaning, of course, as I understood, for the pain and trouble that may be said to have come from her not knowing her own mind. She wished that we should be friends. And"—he turned his head away—"no doubt I could be, in time.... But, you see—in all that, there is nothing whatever to bring me forward again. My fatal mistake last year, I think now, lay in my accepting what she gave me—accepting it so readily, so graspingly even. That was my fault, my blindness, and—it was as unjust to her—as it was hopeless for myself. For hers is a nature"—his eyes came back to his friend; his voice took a new force and energy—"which, in love at any rate, will give all or nothing—and will never be happy itself, or bring happiness, till it gives all. That is what last year taught me. So that even if she—out of kindness or remorse for giving pain—were willing to renew the old tie—I should be her worst enemy and my own if I took a single step towards it. Marriage on such terms as I was thankful for last year, would be humiliation to me, and bring no gain to her. It will never serve a man with her"—his voice broke into emotion—"that he should make no claims! Let him claim the uttermost far-thing—her whole self. If she gives it, then he may know what love means!"

Hallin had listened intently. At Aldous's last words his expression showed pain and perplexity. His mind was full of vague impressions, memories, which seemed to argue with and dispute one of the chief things Aldous had been saying. But they were not definite enough to be put forward. His sensitive chivalrous sense, even in this extreme weakness, remembered the tragic weight that attaches inevitably to dying words. Let him not do more harm than good.

He rested a little. They brought him food; and Aldous sat beside him making pretence to read, so that he might be encouraged to rest. His sister came and went; so did the doctor. But when they were once more alone, Hallin put out his hand and touched his companion.

"What is it, dear Ned?"

"Only one thing more, before we leave it. Is that all that stands between you now—the whole? You spoke to me once in the summer of feeling angry, more angry than you could have believed. Of course, I felt the same. But just now you spoke of its all being your fault. Is there anything changed in your mind?"

Aldous hesitated. It was extraordinarily painful to him to speak of the past, and it troubled him that at such a moment it should trouble Hallin.

"There is nothing changed, Ned, except that perhaps time makes some difference always. I don't want now"—he tried to smile—"as I did then, to make anybody else suffer for my suffering. But perhaps I marvel even more than I did at first, that—that—she could have allowed some things to happen as she did!"

The tone was firm and vibrating; and, in speaking, the whole face had developed a strong animation most passionate and human.

Hallin sighed.

"I often think," he said, "that she was extraordinarily immature—much more immature than most girls of that age—as to feeling. It was really the brain that was alive."

Aldous silently assented; so much so that Hallin repented himself.

"But not now," he said, in his eager dying whisper; "not now. The plant is growing full and tall, into the richest life."

Aldous took the wasted hand tenderly in his own. There was something inexpressibly touching in this last wrestle of Hallin's affection with another's grief. But it filled Aldous with a kind of remorse, and with the longing to free him from that, as from every other burden, in these last precious hours of life. And at last he succeeded, as he thought, in drawing his mind away from it. They passed to other things. Hallin, indeed, talked very little more during the day. He was very restless and weak, but not in much positive suffering. Aldous read to him at intervals, from Isaiah or Plato, the bright sleepless eyes following every word.

At last the light began to sink. The sunset flooded in from the Berkshire uplands and the far Oxford plain, and lay in gold and purple on the falling woods and the green stretches of the park. The distant edges of hill were extraordinarily luminous and clear, and Aldous, looking into the west with the eye of one to whom every spot and line were familiar landmarks, could almost fancy he saw beyond the invisible river, the hill, the "lovely tree against the western sky," which keep for ever the memory of one with whose destiny it had often seemed to him that Hallin's had something in common. To him, as to Thyrsis, the same early joy, the same "happy quest," the same "fugitive and gracious light" for guide and beacon, that—

does not come with houses or with gold, With place, with honour and a flattering crew;

and to him, too, the same tasked pipe and tired throat, the same struggle with the "life of men unblest," the same impatient tryst with death.

The lovely lines ran dirge-like in his head, as he sat, sunk in grief, beside his friend. Hallin did not speak; but his eye took note of every change of light, of every darkening tone, as the quiet English scene with its villages, churches, and woods, withdrew itself plane by plane into the evening haze. His soul followed the quiet deer, the homing birds, loosening itself gently the while from pain and from desire, saying farewell to country, to the poor, to the work left undone, and the hopes unrealised—to everything except to love.

It had just struck six when he bent forward to the window beneath which ran the wide front terrace.

"That was her step!" he said, while his face lit up, "will you bring her here?"

* * * * *

Marcella rang the bell at the Court with a fast beating heart. The old butler who came gave what her shrinking sense thought a forbidding answer to her shy greeting of him, and led her first into the drawing-room. A small figure in deep black rose from a distant chair and came forward stiffly. Marcella found herself shaking hands with Miss Raeburn.

"Will you sit and rest a little before you go upstairs?" said that lady with careful politeness, "or shall I send word at once? He is hardly worse—but as ill as he can be."

"I am not the least tired," said Marcella, and Miss Raeburn rang.

"Tell his lordship, please, that Miss Boyce is here."

The title jarred and hurt Marcella's ear. But she had scarcely time to catch it before Aldous entered, a little bent, as it seemed to her, from his tall erectness, and speaking with an extreme quietness, even monotony of manner.

"He is waiting for you—will you come at once?"

He led her up the central staircase and along the familiar passages, walking silently a little in front of her. They passed the long line of Caroline and Jacobean portraits in the upper gallery, till just outside his own door Aldous paused.

"He ought not to talk long," he said, hesitating, "but you will know—of course—better than any of us."

"I will watch him," she said, almost inaudibly, and he gently opened the door and let her pass, shutting it behind her.

The nurse, who was sitting beside her patient, got up as Marcella entered, and pointed her to a low chair on his further side. Susie Hallin rose too, and kissed the new-comer hurriedly, absently, without a word, lest she should sob. Then she and the nurse disappeared through an inner door. The evening light was still freely admitted; and there were some candles. By the help of both she could only see him indistinctly. But in her own mind, as she sat down, she determined that he had not even days to live.

Yet as she bent over him she saw a playful gleam on the cavernous face.

"You won't scold me?" said the changed voice—"you did warn me—you and Susie—but—I was obstinate. It was best so!"

She pressed her lips to his hand and was answered by a faint pressure from the cold fingers.

"If I could have been there!" she murmured.

"No—I am thankful you were not. And I must not think of it—or of any trouble. Aldous is very bitter—but he will take comfort by and by—he will see it—and them—more justly. They meant me no unkindness. They were full of an idea, as I was. When I came back to myself—first—all was despair. I was in a blank horror of myself and life. Now it has gone—I don't know how. It is not of my own will—some hand has lifted a weight. I seem to float—without pain."

He closed his eyes, gathering strength again in the interval, by a strong effort of will—calling up in the dimming brain what he had to say. She meanwhile, spoke to him in a low voice, mainly to prevent his talking, telling him of her father, of her mother's strain of nursing—of herself—she hardly knew what. Hew grotesque to be giving him these little bits of news about strangers—to him, this hovering, consecrated soul, on the brink of the great secret!

In the intervals, while he was still silent, she could not sometimes prevent the pulse of her own life from stirring. Her eye wandered round the room—Aldous's familiar room. There, on the writing-table with its load of letters and books, stood the photograph of Hallin; another, her own, used to stand beside it; it was solitary now.

Otherwise, all was just as it had been—flowers, books, newspapers—the signs of familiar occupation, the hundred small details of character and personality which in estrangement take to themselves such a smarting significance for the sad and craving heart. The date—the anniversary—echoed in her mind.

Then, with a rush of remorseful pain, her thoughts came back to the present and to Hallin. At the same moment she saw that his eyes were open, and fixed upon her with a certain anxiety and expectancy. He made a movement as though to draw her towards him; and she stooped to him.

"I feel," he said, "as though my strength were leaving me fast. Let me ask you one question—because of my love for you—and him. I have fancied—of late—things were changed. Can you tell me—will you?—or is it unfair?"—the words had all their bright, natural intonation—"Is your heart—still where it was?—or, could you ever—undo the past—"

He held her fast, grasping the hand she had given him with unconscious force. She had looked up startled, her lip trembling like a child's. Then she dropped her head against the arm of her chair, as though she could not speak.

He moved restlessly, and sighed.

"I should not," he said to himself; "I should not—it was wrong. The dying are tyrannous."

He even began a word of sweet apology. But she shook her head.

"Don't!" she said, struggling with herself; "don't say that! It would do me good to speak—to you—"

An exquisite smile dawned on Hallin's face.

"Then!"—he said—"confess!"

* * * * *

A few minutes later they were still sitting together. She strongly wished to go; but he would not yet allow it. His face was full of a mystical joy—a living faith, which must somehow communicate itself in one last sacramental effort.

"How strange that you—and I—and he—should have been so mixed together in this queer life. Now I seem to regret nothing—I hope everything. One more little testimony let me bear!—the last. We disappear one by one—into the dark—but each may throw his comrades—a token—before he goes. You have been in much trouble of mind and spirit—I have seen it. Take my poor witness. There is one clue, one only—goodness—the surrendered will. Everything is there—all faith—all religion—all hope for rich or poor.—Whether we feel our way through consciously to the Will—that asks our will—matters little. Aldous and I have differed much on this—in words—never at heart! I could use words, symbols he cannot—and they have given me peace. But half my best life I owe to him."

At this he made a long pause—but, still, through that weak grasp, refusing to let her go—till all was said. Day was almost gone; the stars had come out over the purple dusk of the park.

"That Will—we reach—through duty and pain," he whispered at last, so faintly she could hardly hear him, "is the root, the source. It leads us in living—it—carries us in death. But our weakness and vagueness—want help—want the human life and voice—to lean on—to drink from. We Christians—are orphans—without Christ! There again—what does it matter what we think—about him—if only we think—of him. In one such life are all mysteries, and all knowledge—and our fathers have chosen for us—"

The insistent voice sank lower and lower into final silence—though the lips still moved. The eyelids too fell. Miss Hallin and the nurse came in. Marcella rose and stood for one passionate instant looking down upon him. Then, with a pressure of the hand to the sister beside her, she stole out. Her one prayer was that she might see and meet no one. So soft was her step that even the watching Aldous did not hear her. She lifted the heavy latch of the outer door without the smallest noise, and found herself alone in the starlight.

* * * * *

After Marcella left him, Hallin remained for some hours in what seemed to those about him a feverish trance. He did not sleep, but he showed no sign of responsive consciousness. In reality his mind all through was full of the most vivid though incoherent images and sensations. But he could no longer distinguish between them and the figures and movements of the real people in his room. Each passed into and intermingled with the other. In some vague, eager way he seemed all the time to be waiting or seeking for Aldous. There was the haunting impression of some word to say—some final thing to do—which would not let him rest. But something seemed always to imprison him, to hold him back, and the veil between him and the real Aldous watching beside him grew ever denser.

At night they made no effort to move him from the couch and the half-sitting posture in which he had passed the day. Death had come too near. His sister and Aldous and the young doctor who had brought him from London watched with him. The curtains were drawn back from both the windows, and in the clearness of the first autumnal frost a crescent moon hung above the woods, the silvery lawns, the plain.

Not long after midnight Hallin seemed to himself to wake, full of purpose and of strength. He spoke, as he thought, to Aldous, asking to be alone with him. But Aldous did not move; that sad watching gaze of his showed no change. Then Hallin suffered a sudden sharp spasm of anguish and of struggle. Three words to say—only three words; but those he must say! He tried again, but Aldous's dumb grief still sat motionless. Then the thought leapt in the ebbing sense, "Speech is gone; I shall speak no more!"

It brought with it a stab, a quick revolt. But something checked both, and in a final offering of the soul, Hallin gave up his last desire.

What Aldous saw was only that the dying man opened his hand as though it asked for that of his friend. He placed his own within those seeking fingers, and Hallin's latest movement—which death stopped half-way—was to raise it to his lips.

* * * * *

So Marcella's confession—made in the abandonment, the blind passionate trust, of a supreme moment—bore no fruit. It went with Hallin to the grave.



CHAPTER III.

"I think I saw the letters arrive," said Mrs. Boyce to her daughter. "And Donna Margherita seems to be signalling to us."

"Let me go for them, mamma."

"No, thank you, I must go in."

And Mrs. Boyce rose from her seat, and went slowly towards the hotel. Marcella watched her widow's cap and black dress as they passed along the pergola of the hotel garden, between bright masses of geraniums and roses on either side.

They had been sitting in the famous garden of the Cappucini Hotel at Amalfi. To Marcella's left, far below the high terrace of the hotel, the green and azure of the Salernian gulf shone and danced in the sun, to her right a wood of oak and arbutus stretched up into a purple cliff—a wood starred above with gold and scarlet berries, and below with cyclamen and narcissus. From the earth under the leafy oaks—for the oaks at Amalfi lose and regain their foliage in winter and spring by imperceptible gradations—came a moist English smell. The air was damp and warm. A convent bell tolled from invisible heights above the garden; while the olives and vines close at hand were full of the chattering voices of gardeners and children, and broken here and there by clouds of pink almond-blossom. March had just begun, and the afternoons were fast lengthening. It was little more than a fortnight since Mr. Boyce's death. In the November of the preceding year Mrs. Boyce and Marcella had brought him to Naples by sea, and there, at a little villa on Posilippo, he had drawn sadly to his end. It had been a dreary time, from which Marcella could hardly hope that her mother would ever fully recover. She herself had found in the long months of nursing—nursing of which, with quiet tenacity, she had gradually claimed and obtained her full share—a deep moral consolation. They had paid certain debts to conscience, and they had for ever enshrined her father's memory in the silence of an unmeasured and loving pity.

But the wife? Marcella sorely recognised that to her mother these last days had brought none of the soothing, reconciling influences they had involved for herself. Between the husband and wife there had been dumb friction and misery—surely also a passionate affection!—to the end. The invalid's dependence on her had been abject, her devotion wonderful. Yet, in her close contact with them, the daughter had never been able to ignore the existence between them of a wretched though tacit debate—reproach on his side, self-defence or spasmodic effort on hers—which seemed to have its origin deep in the past, yet to be stimulated afresh by a hundred passing incidents of the present. Under the blight of it, as under the physical strain of nursing, Mrs. Boyce had worn and dwindled to a white-haired shadow; while he had both clung to life and feared death more than would normally have been the case. At the end he had died in her arms, his head on her breast; she had closed his eyes and performed every last office without a tear; nor had Marcella ever seen her weep from then till now. The letters she had received, mostly, Marcella believed, from her own family, remained unopened in her travelling-bag. She spoke very little, and was constantly restless, nor could Marcella as yet form any idea of the future.

After the funeral at Naples Mrs. Boyce had written immediately to her husband's solicitor for a copy of his will and a statement of affairs. She had then allowed herself to be carried off to Amalfi, and had there, while entirely declining to admit that she was ill, been clearly doing her best to recover health and nerve sufficient to come to some decision, to grapple with some crisis which Marcella also felt to be impending—though as to why it should be impending, or what the nature of it might be, she could only dread and guess.

There was much bitter yearning in the girl's heart as she sat, breathed on by the soft Italian wind blowing from this enchanted sea. The inner cry was that her mother did not love her, had never loved her, and might even now—weird, incredible thought!—be planning to desert her. Hallin was dead—who else was there that cared for her or thought of her? Betty Macdonald wrote often, wild, "schwaermerisch" letters. Marcella looked for them with eagerness, and answered them affectionately. But Betty must soon marry, and then all that would be at an end. Meanwhile Marcella knew well it was Betty's news that made Betty's adoration doubly welcome. Aldous Raeburn—she never did or could think of him under his new name—was apparently in London, much occupied in politics, and constantly, as it seemed, in Betty's society. What likelihood was there that her life and his would ever touch again? She thought often of her confession to Hallin, but in great perplexity of feeling. She had, of course, said no word of secrecy to him at the time. Such a demand in a man's last hour would have been impossible. She had simply followed a certain mystical love and obedience in telling him what he asked to know, and in the strong spontaneous impulse had thought of nothing beyond. Afterwards her pride had suffered fresh martyrdom. Could he, with his loving instinct, have failed to give his friend some sign? If so, it had been unwelcome, for since the day of Hallin's funeral she and Aldous had been more complete strangers than before. Lady Winterbourne, Betty, Frank Leven, had written since her father's death; but from him, nothing.

By the way, Frank Leven had succeeded at Christmas, by old Sir Charles Leven's unexpected death, to the baronetcy and estates. How would that affect his chances with Betty?—if indeed there were any such chances left.

As to her own immediate future, Marcella knew from many indications that Mellor would be hers at once. But in her general tiredness of mind and body she was far more conscious of the burden of her inheritance than of its opportunities. All that vivid castle-building gift which was specially hers, and would revive, was at present in abeyance. She had pined once for power and freedom, that she might make a Kingdom of Heaven of her own, quickly. Now power and freedom, up to a certain point, were about to be put into her hands; and instead of plans for acting largely and bountifully on a plastic outer world, she was saying to herself, hungrily, that unless she had something close to her to love and live for, she could do nothing. If her mother would end these unnatural doubts, if she would begin to make friends with her own daughter, and only yield herself to be loved and comforted, why then it might be possible to think of the village and the straw-plaiting! Otherwise—the girl's attitude as she sat dreaming in the sun showed her despondency.

She was roused by her mother's voice calling her from the other end of the pergola.

"Yes, mamma."

"Will you come in? There are some letters."

"It is the will," thought Marcella, as Mrs. Boyce turned back to the hotel, and she followed.

Mrs. Boyce shut the door of their sitting-room, and then went up to her daughter with a manner which suddenly struck and startled Marcella. There was natural agitation and trouble in it.

"There is something in the will, Marcella, which will, I fear, annoy and distress you. Your father inserted it without consulting me. I want to know what you think ought to be done. You will find that Lord Maxwell and I have been appointed joint executors."

Marcella turned pale.

"Lord Maxwell!" she said, bewildered. "Lord Maxwell—Aldous! What do you mean, mamma?"

Mrs. Boyce put the will into her hands, and, pointing the way among the technicalities she had been perusing while Marcella was still lingering in the garden, showed her the paragraph in question. The words of the will were merely formal: "I hereby appoint," &c., and no more; but in a communication from the family solicitor, Mr. French, which Mrs. Boyce silently handed to her daughter after she had read the legal disposition, the ladies were informed that Mr. Boyce had, before quitting England, written a letter to Lord Maxwell, duly sealed and addressed, with instructions that it should be forwarded to its destination immediately after the writer's burial. "Those instructions," said Mr. French, "I have carried out. I understand that Lord Maxwell was not consulted as to his appointment as executor prior to the drawing up of the will. But you will no doubt hear from him at once, and as soon as we know that he consents to act, we can proceed immediately to probate."

"Mamma, how could he?" said Marcella, in a low, suffocated voice, letting will and letter fall upon her knee.

"Did he give you no warning in that talk you had with him at Mellor?" said Mrs. Boyce, after a minute's silence.

"Not the least," said Marcella, rising restlessly and beginning to walk up and down. "He spoke to me about wishing to bring it on again—asked me to let him write. I told him it was all done with—for ever! As to my own feelings, I felt it was no use to speak of them; but I thought—I believed, I had proved to him that Lord Maxwell had absolutely given up all idea of such a thing; and that it was already probable he would marry some one else. I told him I would rather disappear from every one I knew than consent to it—he could only humiliate us all by saying a word. And now, after that!—"

She stopped in her restless walk, pressing her hands miserably together.

"What does he want with us and our affairs?" she broke out. "He wishes, of course, to have no more to do with me. And now we force him—force him into these intimate relations. What can papa have said in that letter to him? What can he have said? Oh! it is unbearable! Can't we write at once?"

She pressed her hands over her eyes in a passion of humiliation and disgust. Mrs. Boyce watched her closely.

"We must wait, anyway, for his letter," she said. "It ought to be here by to-morrow morning."

Marcella sank on a chair by an open glass door, her eyes wandering, through the straggling roses growing against the wall of the stone balcony outside, to the laughing purples and greens of the sea.

"Of course," she said unhappily, "it is most probable he will consent. It would not be like him to refuse. But, mamma, you must write. I must write and beg him not to do it. It is quite simple. We can manage everything for ourselves. Oh! how could papa?" she broke out again in a low wail, "how could he?"

Mrs. Boyce's lips tightened sharply. It seemed to her a foolish question. She, at least, had had the experience of twenty years out of which to answer it. Death had made no difference. She saw her husband's character and her own seared and broken life with the same tragical clearness; she felt the same gnawing of an affection not to be plucked out while the heart still beat. This act of indelicacy and injustice was like many that had gone before it; and there was in it the same evasion and concealment towards herself. No matter. She had made her account with it all twenty years before. What astonished her was, that the force of her strong coercing will had been able to keep him for so long within the limits of the smaller and meaner immoralities of this world.

"Have you read the rest of the will?" she asked, after a long pause.

Marcella lifted it again, and began listlessly to go through it.

"Mamma!" she said presently, looking up, the colour flushing back into her face, "I find no mention of you in it throughout. There seems to be no provision for you."

"There is none," said Mrs. Boyce, quietly. "There was no need. I have my own income. We lived upon it for years before your father succeeded to Mellor. It is therefore amply sufficient for me now."

"You cannot imagine," cried Marcella, trembling in every limb, "that I am going to take the whole of my father's estate, and leave nothing—nothing for his wife. It would be impossible—unseemly. It would be to do me an injustice, mamma, as well as yourself," she added proudly.

"No, I think not," said Mrs. Boyce, with her usual cold absence of emotion. "You do not yet understand the situation. Your father's misfortunes nearly ruined the estate for a time. Your grandfather went through great trouble, and raised large sums to—" she paused for the right phrase—"to free us from the consequences of your father's actions. I benefited, of course, as much as he did. Those sums crippled all your grandfather's old age. He was a man to whom I was attached—whom I respected. Mellor, I believe, had never been embarrassed before. Well, your uncle did a little towards recovery—but on the whole he was a fool. Your father has done much more, and you, no doubt, will complete it. As for me, I have no claim to anything more from Mellor. The place itself is"—again she stopped for a word of which the energy, when it came, seemed to escape her—"hateful to me. I shall feel freer if I have no tie to it. And at last I persuaded your father to let me have my way."

Marcella rose from her seat impetuously, walked quickly across the room, and threw herself on her knees beside her mother.

"Mamma, are you still determined—now that we two are alone in the world—to act towards me, to treat me as though I were not your daughter—not your child at all, but a stranger?"

It was a cry of anguish. A sudden slight tremor swept over Mrs. Boyce's thin and withered face. She braced herself to the inevitable.

"Don't let us make a tragedy of it, my dear," she said, with a light touch on Marcella's hands. "Let us discuss it reasonably. Won't you sit down? I am not proposing anything very dreadful. But, like you, I have some interests of my own, and I should be glad to follow them—now—a little. I wish to spend some of the year in London; to make that, perhaps, my headquarters, so as to see something of some old friends whom I have had no intercourse with for years—perhaps also of my relations." She spoke of them with a particular dryness. "And I should be glad—after this long time—to be somewhat taken out of oneself, to read, to hear what is going on, to feed one's mind a little."

Marcella, looking at her, saw a kind of feverish light, a sparkling intensity in the pale blue eyes, that filled her with amazement. What, after all, did she know of this strange individuality from which her own being had taken its rise? The same flesh and blood—what an irony of nature!

"Of course," continued Mrs. Boyce, "I should go to you, and you would come to me. It would only be for part of the year. Probably we should get more from each other's lives so. As you know, I long to see things as they are, not conventionally. Anyway, whether I were there or no, you would probably want some companion to help you in your work and plans. I am not fit for them. And it would be easy to find some one who could act as chaperon in my absence."

The hot tears sprang to Marcella's eyes. "Why did you send me away from you, mamma, all my childhood," she cried. "It was wrong—cruel. I have no brother or sister. And you put me out of your life when I had no choice, when I was too young to understand."

Mrs. Boyce winced, but made no reply. She sat with her delicate hand across her brow. She was the white shadow of her former self; but her fragility had always seemed to Marcella more indomitable than anybody else's strength.

Sobs began to rise in Marcella's throat.

"And now," she said, in half-coherent despair, "do you know what you are doing? You are cutting yourself off from me—refusing to have any real bond to me just when I want it most. I suppose you think that I shall be satisfied with the property and the power, and the chance of doing what I like. But"—she tried her best to gulp back her pain, her outraged feeling, to speak quietly—"I am not like that really any more. I can take it all up, with courage and heart, if you will stay with me, and let me—let me—love you and care for you. But, by myself, I feel as if I could not face it! I am not likely to be happy—for a long time—except in doing what work I can. It is very improbable that I shall marry. I dare say you don't believe me, but it is true. We are both sad and lonely. We have no one but each other. And then you talk in this ghastly way of separating from me—casting me off."

Her voice trembled and broke, she looked at her mother with a frowning passion.

Mrs. Boyce still sat silent, studying her daughter with a strange, brooding eye. Under her unnatural composure there was in reality a half-mad impatience, the result of physical and moral reaction. This beauty, this youth, talk of sadness, of finality! What folly! Still, she was stirred, undermined in spite of herself.

"There!" she said, with a restless gesture, "let us, please, talk of it no more. I will come back with you—I will do my best. We will let the matter of my future settlement alone for some months, at any rate, if that will satisfy you or be any help to you."

She made a movement as though to rise from her low chair. But the great waters swelled in Marcella—swelled and broke. She fell on her knees again by her mother, and before Mrs. Boyce could stop her she had thrown her young arms close round the thin, shrunken form.

"Mother!" she said. "Mother, be good to me—love me—you are all I have!"

And she kissed the pale brow and cheek with a hungry, almost a violent tenderness that would not be gainsaid, murmuring wild incoherent things.

Mrs. Boyce first tried to put her away, then submitted, being physically unable to resist, and at last escaped from her with a sudden sob that went to the girl's heart. She rose, went to the window, struggled hard for composure, and finally left the room.

But that evening, for the first time, she let Marcella put her on the sofa, tend her, and read to her. More wonderful still, she went to sleep while Marcella was reading. In the lamplight her face looked piteously old and worn. The girl sat for long with her hands clasped round her knees, gazing down upon it, in a trance of pain and longing.

* * * * *

Marcella was awake early next morning, listening to the full voice of the sea as it broke three hundred feet below, against the beach and rocky walls of the little town. She was lying in a tiny white room, one of the cells of the old monastery, and the sun as it rose above the Salernian mountains—the mountains that hold Paestum in their blue and purple shadows—danced in gold on the white wall. The bell of the cathedral far below tolled the hour. She supposed it must be six o'clock. Two hours more or so, and Lord Maxwell's letter might be looked for.

She lay and thought of it—longed for it, and for the time of answering it, with the same soreness that had marked all the dreams of a restless night. If she could only see her father's letter! It was inconceivable that he should have mentioned her name in his plea. He might have appealed to the old friendship between the families. That was possible, and would have, at any rate, an appearance of decency. But who could answer for it—or for him? She clasped her hands rigidly behind her head, her brows frowning, bending her mind with an intensity of will to the best means of assuring Aldous Raeburn that she and her mother would not encroach upon him. She had a perpetual morbid vision of herself as the pursuer, attacking him now through his friend, now through her father. Oh! when would that letter come, and let her write her own!

She tried to read, but in reality listened for every sound of awakening life in the hotel. When at last her mother's maid came in to call her, she sprang up with a start.

"Deacon, are the letters come?"

"There are two for your mother, miss; none for you."

Marcella threw on her dressing-gown, watched her opportunity, and slipped in to her mother, who occupied a similar cell next door.

Mrs. Boyce was sitting up in bed, with a letter before her, her pale blue eyes fixed absently on the far stretch of sea.

She looked round with a start as Marcella entered. "The letter is to me, of course," she said.

Marcella read it breathlessly.

"Dear Mrs. Boyce,—I have this morning received from your solicitor, Mr. French, a letter written by Mr. Boyce to myself in November of last year. In it he asks me to undertake the office of executor, to which, I hear from Mr. French, he has named me in his will. Mr. French also enquires whether I shall be willing to act, and asks me to communicate with you.

"May I, then, venture to intrude upon you with these few words? Mr. Boyce refers in his touching letter to the old friendship between our families, and to the fact that similar offices have often been performed by his relations for mine, or vice versa. But no reminder of the kind was in the least needed. If I can be of any service to yourself and to Miss Boyce, neither your poor husband nor you could do me any greater kindness than to command me.

"I feel naturally some diffidence in the matter. I gather from Mr. French that Miss Boyce is her father's heiress, and comes at once into the possession of Mellor. She may not, of course, wish me to act, in which case I should withdraw immediately; but I sincerely trust that she will not forbid me the very small service I could so easily and gladly render.

"I cannot close my letter without venturing to express the deep sympathy I have felt for you and yours during the past six months. I have been far from forgetful of all that you have been going through, though I may have seemed so. I trust that you and your daughter will not hurry home for any business cause, if it is still best for your health to stay in Italy. With your instructions Mr. French and I could arrange everything.

"Believe me,

"Yours most sincerely,

"MAXWELL."

"You will find it difficult, my dear, to write a snub in answer to that letter," said Mrs. Boyce, drily, as Marcella laid it down.

Marcella's face was, indeed, crimson with perplexity and feeling.

"Well, we can think it over," she said as she went away.

Mrs. Boyce pondered the matter a good deal when she was left alone. The signs of reaction and change in Marcella were plain enough. What they precisely meant, and how much, was another matter. As to him, Marcella's idea of another attachment might be true, or might be merely the creation of her own irritable pride. Anyway, he was in the mood to write a charming letter. Mrs. Boyce's blanched lip had all its natural irony as she thought it over. To her mind Aldous Raeburn's manners had always been a trifle too good, whether for his own interests or for this wicked world. And if he had any idea now of trying again, let him, for Heaven's sake, not be too yielding or too eager! "It was always the way," thought Mrs. Boyce, remembering a child in white frock and baby shoes—"if you wished to make her want anything, you had to take it away from her."

Meanwhile the mere thought that matters might even yet so settle themselves drew from the mother a long breath of relief. She had spent an all but sleepless night, tormented by Marcella's claim upon her. After twenty years of self-suppression this woman of forty-five, naturally able, original, and independent, had seen a glimpse of liberty. In her first youth she had been betrayed as a wife, degraded as a member of society. A passion she could not kill, combined with some stoical sense of inalienable obligation, had combined to make her both the slave and guardian of her husband up to middle life; and her family and personal pride, so strong in her as a girl, had found its only outlet in this singular estrangement she had achieved between herself and every other living being, including her own daughter. Now her husband was dead, and all sorts of crushed powers and desires, mostly of the intellectual sort, had been strangely reviving within her. Just emerged, as she was, from the long gloom of nursing, she already wished to throw it all behind her—to travel, to read, to make acquaintances—she who had lived as a recluse for twenty years! There was in it a last clutch at youth, at life. And she had no desire to enter upon this new existence—in comradeship with Marcella. They were independent and very different human beings. That they were mother and daughter was a mere physical accident.

Moreover, though she was amply conscious of the fine development in Marcella during the past two years, it is probable that she felt her daughter even less congenial to her now than of old. For the rich, emotional nature had, as we have seen, "suffered conviction," had turned in the broad sense to "religion," was more and more sensitive, especially since Hallin's death, to the spiritual things and symbols in the world. At Naples she had haunted churches; had read, as her mother knew, many religious books.

Now Mrs. Boyce in these matters had a curious history. She had begun life as an ardent Christian, under evangelical influences. Her husband, on the other hand, at the time she married him was a man of purely sceptical opinions, a superficial disciple of Mill and Comte, and fond of an easy profanity which seemed to place him indisputably with the superior persons of this world. To the amazement and scandal of her friends, Evelyn Merritt had not been three months his wife before she had adopted his opinions en bloc, and was carrying them out to their logical ends with a sincerity and devotion quite unknown to her teacher. Thenceforward her conception of things—of which, however, she seldom spoke—had been actively and even vehemently rationalist; and it had been one of the chief sorenesses and shames of her life at Mellor that, in order to suit his position as country squire, Richard Boyce had sunk to what, in her eyes, were a hundred mean compliances with things orthodox and established.

Then, in his last illness, he had finally broken away from her, and his own past. "Evelyn, I should like to see a clergyman," he had said to her in his piteous voice, "and I shall ask him to give me the Sacrament." She had made every arrangement accordingly; but her bitter soul could see nothing in the step but fear and hypocrisy; and he knew it. And as he lay talking alone with the man whom they had summoned, two or three nights before the end, she, sitting in the next room, had been conscious of a deep and smarting jealousy. Had not the hard devotion of twenty years made him at least her own? And here was this black-coated reciter of incredible things stepping into her place. Only in death she recovered him wholly. No priest interfered while he drew his last breath upon her bosom.

And now Marcella! Yet the girl's voice and plea tugged at her withered heart. She felt a dread of unknown softnesses—of being invaded and weakened by things in her akin to her daughter, and so captured afresh. Her mind fell upon the bare idea of a revival of the Maxwell engagement, and caressed it.

Meanwhile Marcella stood dressing by the open window in the sunlight, which filled the room with wavy reflections caught from the sea. Fishing-boats were putting off from the beach, three hundred feet below her; she could hear the grating of the keels, the songs of the boatmen. On the little breakwater to the right an artist's white umbrella shone in the sun; and a half-naked boy, poised on the bows of a boat moored beside the painter, stood bent in the eager attitude of one about to drop the bait into the blue wave below. His brown back burnt against the water. Cliff, houses, sea, glowed in warmth and light; the air was full of roses and orange-blossom; and to an English sense had already the magic of summer.

And Marcella's hands, as she coiled and plaited her black hair, moved with a new lightness; for the first time since her father's death her look had its normal fire, crossed every now and then by something that made her all softness and all woman. No! as her mother said, one could not snub that letter or its writer. But how to answer it! In imagination she had already penned twenty different replies. How not to be grasping or effusive, and yet to show that you could feel and repay kindness—there was the problem!

Meanwhile, from that letter, or rather in subtle connection with it, her thoughts at last went wandering off with a natural zest to her new realm of Mellor, and to all that she would and could do for the dwellers therein.



CHAPTER IV.

It was a bleak east-wind day towards the end of March. Aldous was at work in the library at the Court, writing at his grandfather's table, where in general he got through his estate and county affairs, keeping his old sitting-room upstairs for the pursuits that were more particularly his own.

All the morning he had been occupied with a tedious piece of local business, wading through endless documents concerning a dispute between the head-master of a neighbouring grammar-school and his governing body, of which Aldous was one. The affair was difficult, personal, odious. To have wasted nearly three hours upon it was, to a man of Aldous's type, to have lost a day. Besides he had not his grandfather's knack in such things, and was abundantly conscious of it.

However, there it was, a duty which none but he apparently could or would do, and he had been wrestling with it. With more philosophy than usual, too, since every tick of the clock behind him bore him nearer to an appointment which, whatever it might be, would not be tedious.

At last he got up and went to the window to look at the weather. A cutting wind, clearly, but no rain. Then he walked into the drawing-room, calling for his aunt. No one was to be seen, either there or in the conservatory, and he came back to the library and rang.

"Roberts, has Miss Raeburn gone out?"

"Yes, my lord," said the old butler addressed. "She and Miss Macdonald have gone out driving, and I was to tell your lordship that Miss Raeburn would drop Miss Macdonald at Mellor on her way home."

"Is Sir Frank anywhere about?"

"He was in the smoking-room a little while ago, my lord."

"Will you please try and find him?"

"Yes, my lord."

Aldous's mouth twitched with impatience as the old servant shut the door.

"How many times did Roberts manage to be-lord me in a minute?" he asked himself; "yet if I were to remonstrate, I suppose I should only make him unhappy."

And walking again to the window, he thrust his hands into his pockets and stood looking out with a far from cheerful countenance.

One of the things that most tormented him indeed in this recent existence was a perpetual pricking sense of the contrast between this small world of his ancestral possessions and traditions, with all its ceremonial and feudal usage, and the great rushing world outside it of action and of thought. Do what he would, he could not un-king himself within the limits of the Maxwell estate. To the people living upon it he was the man of most importance within their ken, was inevitably their potentate and earthly providence. He confessed that there was a real need of him, if he did his duty. But on this need the class-practice of generations had built up a deference, a sharpness of class-distinction, which any modern must find more and more irksome in proportion to his modernness. What was in Aldous's mind, as he stood with drawn brows looking out over the view which showed him most of his domain, was a sort of hot impatience of being made day by day, in a hundred foolish ways, to play at greatness.

Yet, as we know, he was no democrat by conviction, had no comforting faith in what seemed to him the rule of a multitudinous ignorance. Still every sane man of to-day knows, at any rate, that the world has taken the road of democracy, and that the key to the future, for good or ill, lies not in the revolts and speculations of the cultivated few, but in the men and movements that can seize the many. Aldous's temper was despondently critical towards the majority of these, perhaps; he had, constitutionally, little of that poet's sympathy with the crowd, as such, which had given Hallin his power. But, at any rate, they filled the human stage—these men and movements—and his mind as a beholder. Beside the great world-spectacle perpetually in his eye and thought, the small old-world pomps and feudalisms of his own existence had a way of looking ridiculous to him. He constantly felt himself absurd. It was ludicrously clear to him, for instance, that in this kingdom he had inherited it would be thought a huge condescension on his part if he were to ask the secretary of a trades union to dine with him at the Court. Whereas, in his own honest opinion, the secretary had a far more important and interesting post in the universe than he.

So that, in spite of a strong love of family, rigidly kept to himself, he had very few of the illusions which make rank and wealth delightful. On the other hand, he had a tyrannous sense of obligation, which kept him tied to his place and his work—to such work as he had been spending the morning on. This sense of obligation had for the present withdrawn him from any very active share in politics. He had come to the conclusion early in the year, just about the time when, owing to some rearrangements in the personnel of the Government, the Premier had made him some extremely flattering overtures, that he must for the present devote himself to the Court. There were extensive changes and reforms going on in different parts of the estate: some of the schools which he owned and mainly supported were being rebuilt and enlarged; and he had a somewhat original scheme for the extension of adult education throughout the property very much on his mind—a scheme which must be organised and carried through by himself apparently, if it was to thrive at all.

Much of this business was very dreary to him, some of it altogether distasteful. Since the day of his parting with Marcella Boyce his only real pleasures had lain in politics or books. Politics, just as they were growing absorbing to him, must, for a while at any rate, be put aside; and even books had not fared as well as they might have been expected to do in the country quiet. Day after day he walked or rode about the muddy lanes of the estate, doing the work that seemed to him to be his, as best he could, yet never very certain of its value; rather, spending his thoughts more and more, with regard to his own place and function in the world, on a sort of mental apologetic which was far from stimulating; sorely conscious the while of the unmatched charm and effectiveness with which his grandfather had gone about the same business; and as lonely at heart as a man can well be—the wound of love unhealed, the wound of friendship still deep and unconsoled. To bring social peace and progress, as he understood them, to this bit of Midland England a man of first-rate capacities was perhaps sacrificing what ambition would have called his opportunities. Yet neither was he a hero to himself nor to the Buckinghamshire farmers and yokels who depended on him. They had liked the grandfather better, and had become stolidly accustomed to the grandson's virtues.

The only gleam in the grey of his life since he had determined about Christmas-time to settle down at the Court had come from Mr. French's letter. That letter, together with Mr. Boyce's posthumous note, which contained nothing, indeed, but a skilful appeal to neighbourliness and old family friendship, written in the best style of the ex-Balkan Commissioner, had naturally astonished him greatly. He saw at once what she would perceive in it, and turned impatiently from speculation as to what Mr. Boyce might actually have meant, to the infinitely more important matter, how she would take her father's act. Never had he written anything with greater anxiety than he devoted to his letter to Mrs. Boyce. There was in him now a craving he could not stay, to be brought near to her again, to know how her life was going. It had first raised its head in him since he knew that her existence and Wharton's were finally parted, and had but gathered strength from the self-critical loneliness and tedium of these later months.

Mrs. Boyce's reply couched in terms at once stately and grateful, which accepted his offer of service on her own and her daughter's behalf, had given him extraordinary pleasure. He turned it over again and again, wondering what part or lot Marcella might have had in it, attributing to her this cordiality or that reticence; picturing the two women together in their black dresses—the hotel, the pergola, the cliff—all of which he himself knew well. Finally, he went up to town, saw Mr. French, and acquainted himself with the position and prospects of the Mellor estate, feeling himself a sort of intruder, yet curiously happy in the business. It was wonderful what that poor sickly fellow had been able to do in the last two years; yet his thoughts fell rather into amused surmise as to what she would find it in her restless mind to do in the next two years.

Nevertheless, all the time, the resolution of which he had spoken to Hallin seemed to himself unshaken. He recognised and adored the womanly growth and deepening which had taken place in her; he saw that she wished to show him kindness. But he thought he could trust himself now and henceforward not to force upon her a renewed suit for which there was in his eyes no real or abiding promise of happiness.

Marcella and her mother had now been at home some three or four days, and he was just about to walk over to Mellor for his first interview with them. A great deal of the merely formal business consequent on Mr. Boyce's death had been already arranged by himself and Mr. French. Yet he had to consult Marcella as to certain investments, and in a pleasant though quite formal little note he had that morning received from her she had spoken of asking his advice as to some new plans for the estate. It was the first letter she herself had as yet written to him; hitherto all his correspondence had been carried on with Mrs. Boyce. It had struck him, by the way, as remarkable that there was no mention of the wife in the will. He could only suppose that she was otherwise provided for. But there had been some curious expressions in her letters.

Where was Frank? Aldous looked impatiently at the clock, as Roberts did not reappear. He had invited Leven to walk with him to Mellor, and the tiresome boy was apparently not to be found. Aldous vowed he would not wait a minute, and going into the hall, put on coat and hat with most business-like rapidity.

He was just equipped when Roberts, somewhat breathless with long searching, arrived in time to say that Sir Frank was on the front terrace.

And there Aldous caught sight of the straight though somewhat heavily built figure, in its grey suit with the broad band of black across the arm.

"Hullo, Frank! I thought you were to look me up in the library. Roberts has been searching the house for you."

"You said nothing about the library," said the boy, rather sulkily, "and Roberts hadn't far to search. I have been in the smoking-room till this minute."

Aldous did not argue the point, and they set out. It was presently clear to the elder man that his companion was not in the best of tempers. The widowed Lady Leven had sent her firstborn over to the Court for a few days that Aldous might have some discussion as to his immediate future with the young man. She was a silly, frivolous woman; but it was clear, even to her, that Frank was not doing very well for himself in the world; and advice she would not have taken from her son's Oxford tutor seemed cogent to her when it came from a Raeburn. "Do at least, for goodness' sake, get him to give up his absurd plan of going to America!" she wrote to Aldous; "if he can't take his degree at Oxford, I suppose he must get on without it, and certainly his dons seem very unpleasant. But at least he might stay at home and do his duty to me and his sisters till he marries, instead of going off to the 'Rockies' or some other ridiculous place. He really never seems to think of Fanny and Rachel, or what he might do to help me to get them settled now that his poor father is gone."

No; certainly the young man was not much occupied with "Fanny and Rachel!" He spoke with ill-concealed impatience, indeed, of both his sisters and his mother. If his people would get in the way of everything he wanted to do, they needn't wonder if he cut up rough at home. For the present it was settled that he should at any rate go back to Oxford till the end of the summer term—Aldous heartily pitying the unfortunate dons who might have to do with him—but after that he entirely declined to be bound. He swore he would not be tied at home like a girl; he must and would see the world. This in itself, from a lad who had been accustomed to regard his home as the centre of all delights, and had on two occasions stoutly refused to go with his family to Rome, lest he should miss the best month for his father's trout-stream, was sufficiently surprising.

However, of late some tardy light had been dawning upon Aldous! The night after Frank's arrival at the Court Betty Macdonald came down to spend a few weeks with Miss Raeburn, being for the moment that lady's particular pet and protegee. Frank, whose sulkiness during the twenty-four hours before she appeared had been the despair of both his host and hostess, brightened up spasmodically when he heard she was expected, and went fishing with one of the keepers, on the morning before her arrival, with a fair imitation of his usual spirits. But somehow, since that first evening, though Betty had chattered, and danced, and frolicked her best, though her little figure running up and down the big house gave a new zest to life in it, Frank's manners had gone from bad to worse. And at last Aldous, who had not as yet seen the two much together, and was never an observant man in such matters, had begun to have an inkling. Was it possible that the boy was in love, and with Betty? He sounded Miss Raeburn; found that she did not rise to his suggestion at all—was, in fact, annoyed by it—and with the usual stupidity of the clever man failed to draw any reasonable inference from the queerness of his aunt's looks and sighs.

As to the little minx herself, she was inscrutable. She teased them all in turns, Frank, perhaps, less than the others. Aldous, as usual, found her a delightful companion. She would walk all over the estate with him in the most mannish garments and boots conceivable, which only made her childish grace more feminine and more provocative than ever. She took an interest in all his tenants; she dived into all his affairs; she insisted on copying his letters. And meanwhile, on either side were Miss Raeburn, visibly recovering day by day her old cheeriness and bustle, and Frank—Frank, who ate nothing, or nothing commensurate to his bulk, and, if possible, said less.

Aldous had begun to feel that the situation must be probed somehow, and had devised this walk, indeed, with some vague intention of plying remonstrances and enquiries. He had an old affection for the boy, which Lady Leven had reckoned upon.

The first difficulty, of course, was to make him talk at all. Aldous tried various sporting "gambits" with very small success. At last, by good-luck, the boy rose to something like animation in describing an encounter he had had the week before with a piebald weasel in the course of a morning's ferreting.

"All at once we saw the creature's head poke out of the hole—pure white, with a brown patch on it. When it saw us, back it scooted!—and we sent in another ferret after the one that was there already. My goodness! there was a shindy down in the earth—you could hear them rolling and kicking like anything. We had our guns ready,—but all of a sudden everything stopped—not a sound or a sign of anything! We threw down our guns and dug away like blazes. Presently we came on the two ferrets gorging away at a dead rabbit,—nasty little beasts!—that accounted for them; but where on earth was the weasel? I really began to think we had imagined the creature, when, whish! came a flash of white lightning, and out the thing bolted—pure white with a splash of brown—its winter coat, of course. I shot at it, but it was no go. If I'd only put a bag over the hole, and not been an idiot, I should have caught it."

The boy swung along, busily ruminating for a minute or two, and forgetting his trouble.

"I've seen one something like it before," he went on—"ages ago, when I was a little chap, and Harry Wharton and I were out rabbiting. By the way—" he stopped short—"do you see that that fellow's come back?"

"I saw the paragraph in the Times this morning," said Aldous, drily.

"And I've got a letter from Fanny this morning, to say that he and Lady Selina are to be married in July, and that she's going about making a martyr and a saint of him, talking of the 'persecution' he's had to put up with, and the vulgar fellows who couldn't appreciate him, and generally making an ass of herself. Oh! he won't ask any of us to his wedding—trust him. It is a rum business. You know Willie Ffolliot—that queer dark fellow—that used to be in the 10th Hussars—did all those wild things in the Soudan?"

"Yes—slightly."

"I heard all about it from him. He was one of that gambling set at Harry's club there's been all that talk about you know, since Harry came to grief. Well!—he was going along Piccadilly one night last summer, quite late, between eleven and twelve, when Harry caught hold of him from behind. Willie thought he was out of his mind, or drunk. He told me he never saw anybody in such a queer state in his life. 'You come along with me,' said Harry, 'come and talk to me, or I shall shoot myself!' So Willie asked him what was up. 'I'm engaged to be married,' said Harry. Whereupon Willie remarked that, considering his manner and his appearance, he was sorry for the young lady. 'Young!' said Harry as though he would have knocked him down. And then it came out that he had just—that moment!—engaged himself to Lady Selina. And it was the very same day that he got into that precious mess in the House—the very same night! I suppose he went to her to be comforted, and thought he'd pull something off, anyway! Why she took him! But of course she's no chicken, and old Alresford may die any day. And about the bribery business—I suppose he made her think him an injured innocent. Anyway, he talked to Willie, when they got to his rooms, like a raving lunatic, and you know he was always such a cool hand. 'Ffolliot,' he said, 'can you come with me to Siam next week?' 'How much?' said Will. 'I thought you were engaged to Lady Selina.' Then he swore little oaths, and vowed he had told her he must have a year. 'We'll go and explore those temples in Siam,' he said, and then he muttered something about 'Why should I ever come back?' Presently he began to talk of the strike—and the paper—and the bribe, and all the rest of it, making out a long rigmarole story. Oh! of course he'd done everything for the best—trust him!—and everybody else was a cur and a slanderer. And Ffolliot declared he felt quite pulpy—the man was such a wreck; and he said he'd go with him to Siam, or anywhere else, if he'd only cheer up. And they got out the maps, and Harry began to quiet down, and at last Will got him to bed. Fanny says Ffolliot reports he had great difficulty in dragging him home. However, Lady Selina has no luck!—there he is."

"Oh! he will be one of the shining lights of our side before long," said Aldous, with resignation. "Since he gave up his seat here, there has been some talk of finding him one in the Alresfords' neighbourhood, I believe. But I don't suppose anybody's very anxious for him. He is to address a meeting, I see, on the Tory Labour Programme next week. The Clarion, I suppose, will go round with him."

"Beastly rag!" said Frank, fervently. "It's rather a queer thing, isn't it, that such a clever chap as that should have made such a mess of his chances. It almost makes one not mind being a fool."

He laughed, but bitterly, and at the same moment the cloud that for some twenty minutes or so seemed to have completely rolled away descended again on eye and expression.

"Well, there are worse things than being a fool," said Aldous, with insidious emphasis—"sulking, and shutting up with your best friends, for instance."

Frank flushed deeply, and turned upon him with a sort of uncertain fury.

"I don't know what you mean."

Whereupon Aldous slipped his arm inside the boy's, and prepared himself with resignation for the scene that had to be got through somehow, when Frank suddenly exclaimed:

"I say, there's Miss Boyce!"

Never was a man more quickly and completely recalled from altruism to his own affairs. Aldous dropped his companion's arm, straightened himself with a thrill of the whole being, and saw Marcella some distance ahead of them in the Mellor drive, which they had just entered. She was stooping over something on the ground, and was not apparently aware of their approach. A ray of cold sun came out at the moment, touched the bending figure and the grass at her feet—grass starred with primroses, which she was gathering.

"I didn't know you were going to call," said Frank, bewildered. "Isn't it too soon?"

And he looked at his companion in astonishment.

"I came to speak to Miss Boyce and her mother on business," said Aldous, with all his habitual reserve. "I thought you wouldn't mind the walk back by yourself."

"Business?" the boy echoed involuntarily.

Aldous hesitated, then said quietly:

"Mr. Boyce appointed me executor under his will."

Frank lifted his eyebrows, and allowed himself at least an inward "By Jove!"

By this time Marcella had caught sight of them, and was advancing. She was in deep mourning, but her hands were full of primroses, which shone against the black; and the sun, penetrating the thin green of some larches to her left, danced in her eyes and on a face full of sensitive and beautiful expression.

They had not met since they stood together beside Hallin's grave. This fact was in both their minds. Aldous felt it, as it were, in the touch of her hand. What he could not know was, that she was thinking quite as much of his letter to her mother and its phrases.

They stood talking a little in the sunshine. Then, as Frank was taking his leave, Marcella said:

"Won't you wait for—for Lord Maxwell, in the old library? We can get at it from the garden, and I have made it quite habitable. My mother, of course, does not wish to see anybody."

Frank hesitated, then, pushed by a certain boyish curiosity, and by the angry belief that Betty had been carried off by Miss Raeburn, and was out of his reach till luncheon-time, said he would wait. Marcella led the way, opened the garden-door of the lower corridor, close to the spot where she had seen Wharton standing in the moonlight on a never-to-be-forgotten night, and then ushered them into the library. The beautiful old place had been decently repaired, though in no sense modernised. The roof had no holes, and its delicate stucco-work, formerly stained and defaced by damp, had been whitened, so that the brown and golden tones of the books in the latticed cases told against it with delightful effect. The floor was covered with a cheap matting, and there were a few simple chairs and tables. A wood fire burnt on the old hearth. Marcella's books and work lay about, and some shallow earthenware pans filled with home-grown hyacinths scented the air. What with the lovely architecture of the room itself, its size, its books and old portraits, and the signs it bore of simple yet refined use, it would have been difficult to find a gentler, mellower place. Aldous looked round him with delight.

"I hope to make a village drawing-room of it in time," she said casually to Frank as she stooped to put a log on the fire. "I think we shall get them to come, as it has a separate door, and scraper, and mat all to itself."

"Goodness!" said Frank, "they won't come. It's too far from the village."

"Don't you be so sure," said Marcella, laughing. "Mr. Craven has all sorts of ideas."

"Who's Mr. Craven?"

"Didn't you meet him at my rooms?"

"Oh! I remember," ejaculated the boy—"a frightful Socialist!"

"And his wife's worse," said Marcella, merrily. "They've come down to settle here. They're going to help me."

"Then for mercy's sake keep them to yourself," cried Frank, "and don't let them go loose over the county. We don't want them at our place."

"Oh! your turn will come. Lord Maxwell"—her tone changed—became shy and a little grave. "Shall we go into the Stone Parlour? My mother will come down if you wish to see her, but she thought that—that—perhaps we could settle things."