Marcella

of the stately "garden front," added to the original structure of t

ur and general effect bestowed on them by time and dilapidation. The marble mantelpiece was elaborately carved in Chinamen and pagodas. There were Chinese curiosities of a miscellaneous kind on the tables, and the beautiful remains of an Indian carpet underfoot. Unluckily, some later Boyce had thrust a crudely Gothic sideboard, with an arched and pillared front, adapted to the purposes of

eady at table, together with M

ice of the establishment; his wife was talking to her dog, but from the lift of her eyebrows, and the twitching of h

d hand it round instead of staring about you like a stuck pig. What they taught you at S

ring of crumbs, handed it clumsily round, and then took glad advant

ce, with an angry fro

blandly, "you would, I think, be less annoyed. And as I believe William was

as the hot reply. "None of my family have ever attempted to run

yce may do!" said his wife carelessly. "I

as yellow as that of the typical Anglo-Indian. The special character of the mouth was hidden by a fine black moustache, but his prevailing expression varied between irritability and a kind of plaintiveness. The conspicuous blue eyes were as a rule melancholy; but they could be childishly bright and self-assertive. There was a gener

poke on Lynn's nose. "Someone from the village of course has been talking-the cook says she heard something last night, though s

n the village?" ask

. The sheriff's officers were advancing on the house. Their approach displeased him, and he put an end to himself at the head of the little

ce they mean. He was a ruffian, but he shot himself in London;

ou give a little lecture on the family in the servants' hal

sympathetic interest. Detachment was perhaps the characteristic note of Mrs. Boyce's manner,-

la pon

said presently. "He will have heard them in the

Lady Bountiful airs that Marcella had already assumed during the si

got to do with a water-supply for the village? It will be as much as ever I can manage to keep

's cheek

y, wretched-looking children in my life as swarm about those cottages. We take the rent, and we ought to l

d at him

ate of this house and the pinch for money altogether is enough, I should think, to take a man's mind. Don't you go talking to Mr. Harden

aid Marcella sarcastical

ound, as though calling to wit

ast few weeks had become something of a perplexity and disturbance to him,-"I tell you our great effort, the effort of us all, must be to keep up the family position!-our position. Look at that library, and its condi

might have been actors performing for her amusement. And yet, amusement is not precisely the word. For that hazel eye, wit

atching him, his look wavered, and his mood collapsed.

cialist friends, Marcella?" asked Mrs. Boyce lightly, in the paus

d something of a proud reticence. "Mr. Harden is very ki

fe generally avoided Mrs. Boyce when they could. Marcella being all sentiment and impulse, was cons

pushed up against her. "Well, I am sorry for the Hardens. They tell me they give all their substance away-already-and every one says it is going to be a

ly. It seemed to her often that she sai

no helpers-the people always ill-wages eleven and twelve shillings a week-and only the old wrecks of men left to do the work! He might, I think, expect the people in t

and throwing away his cigarette-"Lord Maxwell! Difference! I should think so. Thirty thousand a year, if he has a p

d to admit William the footman, in his usual tre

ease sir, is ther

id Mr. Boyce, his look

swer, just as I w

arted, a strange expectancy in her whole attitude. He tore

Boyce sat down and began carefully to put the fir

close observer to quiver and then stiffen as she stood in the light of the window, a tall an

watched h

t a note from

nt across to him, determined to speak out. Her parents were not her friends, and did not possess her confidence; but her constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimes the result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger might have had. She had no habitual defe

Maxwell's note

d and began to rub his c

rabbit. It was in one of the fields over by Soleyhurst, just where the two estates join. After that we were always companions-we used to go out at night with the keepers after poachers; we spent hours in the snow

rcella, impatiently. She laid her hand, howe

daily worry of her awakening curiosities, and one of his resolutions in coming to Mellor Park had been to keep up his dignity with he

at least since he and Miss Raeburn came back from Scotland, and not a card nor a word from either of them! Nor from the Winterbournes, nor the Levens. Pleasant! Well, my dear, you must make up your mind to it. I did think-I was fool enough to think-that when I came back to the old place,

tion of that sympathetic pride which the ear exp

vents of the last six weeks-now over incidents of those long-past holidays. Was this, indeed, the second vo

hose coverts, papa?" she asked

Home Farm. It was an exchange made year after year in my father's time. When I spoke to the keeper, I found it had been allowed to lapse. Your uncle let the shooting go t

ce rose, drew his emaciated frame to its full height, and stood looking out drearily to hi

out it, if I see him in the villag

and looked at her

urn?" he inquired. "I remember hea

has always made himself agreeable. Mr. Harden says his grandfather is devoted to him, and will hardly ever let him go away from home. He does a great d

son," said Mr. Boyce with a sneer. "That goes wi

er. "He takes a lot of trouble down here, about the cottages and the board of guardians and the farms. The Hardens like him very muc

-like some of his uncl

"But he was civi

a quick considering

hen she spoke again. "I must go off to the church; the Hardens have hard work

if you see Reynolds anywhere about the drive, you can send him to me. He and I are going round the Home Farm to pick up a few birds if we can, and see what the coverts look like. The stoc

Marcella's cheek as

d, her black eyes lightening, and without another word she opened the French window a

ntly astonished him, as she moved and talked under his eye, was the girl's beauty. Surely she had been a plain child, though a striking one. But now she had not only beauty, but the air of beauty. The self-confidence given by the possession of good looks was very evident in her behaviour. She was very accomplished, too, and more clever than was always quite agreeable to a father whose self-conceit was

*

south, making thereby a sunny and sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowers grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as though conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty. The grass indeed wanted mowi

y moved to revolt and tenderness by

hutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,-in short, the general self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,-where would have been that thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely, which the old place so constantly made upon her? It seemed to depend even upo

t to force her mother to any line of action Mrs. Boyce was unwilling to follow, was beyond her power. And it was not easy to go to her father directly and say, "Tell me exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back upon you." All the same, it was due to them all, due to herself especially, now that she was g

tion of outcasts. Their poverty and the shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them the disrespect of one class; and as to the acquaintances and friends of their own rank, what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cool distaste for their company, an insulting readiness to forget

reflected that here, in his own country, where his history was best known, the feeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably be strongest. Well, it was hard upon them!-hard upon her moth

nder the great limes of the Park, far away from parsonage and village-the property, it seemed, of the big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south sides were bot

end his later years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and then with the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithful idea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a family of any very great pretensions-a race for the most part of frugal, upright country gentlemen-to be found, with scarcely an exception, on the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fo

rts, the friend of Horace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whatever doors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper classes of the leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly acquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome an Italian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her home to Mellor, where stra

er tomb bore no long-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace-for she was Italian to the last, an

ior hand; but the Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her own physique and her father's were to be traced to

eside her in a tumbled heap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitable pride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one great lifting wave. The depression o

of the developed individual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice and wrong. Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last two years had brought her of

write what he pleased. It did not alter the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly one of the partis most coveted, and one of the men most observ

n way, and her parents' too. At twenty-one, nothing looks ir

s most pitiful aspects. Men of sixty and upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had worked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of their generation, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but the workhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impassive, resigned, now showing a furtive childish amusement if a schoolboy misbehaved, or a dog strayed into church, now joining with a stolid unconsciousness in the tremendous sayings of the Psalms; women coarse, or worn, or hopeless; girls and boys and young children already

and their surroundings; alternately pleased and repelled by their cringing; now enjoying her position among them with the natural aristocratic inst

er things in the world. As she stood on the chancel step, vowing herself to these great things, she was conscious

e root of her, and her strained mood s

ar her words quite plainly in the silent church. As she spoke she st

ing and waiting. Before her stretched a green field path leading across the park to the village. The vicar and his sister were coming along it

inous and steady glow. She waited quietly for them, hardly responding to the affectionate signals of the vicar's