 Book 3 Chapter 9 of Marcella How enchanting! cried Marcella as they emerged on the terrace and the river, shore, and sky opened upon them in all the thousand tinted light and shade of a still and perfect evening. Oh, how hot we were, and how badly you treat us in those dens! Those confident eyes of Wharton's shown as they glanced at her. She wore a pretty white dress of some cotton stuff, it seemed to him he remembered it of old, and on the waving masses of hair lay a little bunch of black lace that called itself a bonnet, with black strings tied demurely under the chin. The abundance of character and dignity in the beauty which yet tonight was so young and glowing, the rich arresting note of the voice, the inimitable carriage of the head. Wharton realized them all at the moment with peculiar vividness, because he felt them in some sort as additions to his own personal wealth. Despite she was in his power, his possession. The terrace was full of people and alive with a babble of talk, yet as he carried his companions forward in search of Mrs. Lane, he saw that Marcella was instantly marked. Everyone who passed them, or made wait for them, looked, and looked again. The girl, absorbed in her pleasant or agitating impressions, knew nothing of her own effect. She was drinking in the sunset light, the poetic mystery of the river, the lovely line of the bridge, the associations of the place where she stood of this great building overshadowing her. Every now and then she started in a kind of terror lest some figure in the dusk should be Aldous Rayburn. Then when a stranger showed himself, she gave herself up again to her young pleasure in the crowd and the spectacle. But Wharton knew that she was observed. Wharton caught the whisper that followed her. His vanity, already so well fed this evening, took the attention given to her as so much fresh homage to itself, and she had more and more glamour for him in the reflected light of this publicity, this common judgment. Oh, here are the lanes, he said, detecting at last a short lady in black amid a group of men. While I needeth were introduced, then Edith found a friend and a young London member who was to be one of the party, and strolled off with him till dinner should be announced. I will just take Miss Boyce to the end of the terrace, said Wharton to Mr. Lane. We shan't get anything to eat yet awhile, what a crowd! They all rest for us, have not come yet, I see. Lane shrugged his shoulders as he looked round. Wharton has a party to-night, and there are at least three or four others besides ourselves. I should think food and service will be equally scarce. Wharton glanced quickly at Marcella, but she was talking to Mrs. Lane and had heard nothing. Let me just show you the terrace, he said to her, no chance of dinner for another twenty minutes. They strolled away together as they moved along a number of men waylaid the speaker of the night with talk and congratulations. Everything the while at the lady on his left, but presently they were away from the crowd which hung about the main entrance to the terrace, and had reached the comparatively quiet western end, where were only a few pairs and groups walking up and down. Shall I see Mr. Bennett? She asked him eagerly as they paused by the parapet, looking down upon the grey-brown water swishing under the fast incoming tide. I want to. I asked him to dine, but he wouldn't. He has gone to a prayer meeting, at least I guess so. There is a famous American evangelist speaking in Westminster tonight. I am as certain as I ever am of anything that Bennett is there, dining on moody and sanky. Men are medley, don't you think? So you liked his speech? How cool you ask, she said, laughing. Did you? He was silent a moment. His smiling gaze fixed on the water. Then he turned to her. How much gratitude do you think I owe him? As much as you can pay, she said with emphasis, I never heard anything more complete, more generous. So you were carried away? She looked at him with a curious, sudden gravity, a touch of defiance. No, neither by him nor by you, I don't believe in your bill, and I am sure you will never carry it. Everything lifted his eyebrows. Perhaps you'll tell me where you are, he said, that I may know how to talk. When we last discussed these things at Mellor, I think. You were a socialist? What does it matter what I was last year? She asked him gaily, yet with a final inflection of the voice which was not gay. I was a baby. Now perhaps I have earned a few poor little opinions, but they are a ragged bundle, and I have never any time to sort them. Have you left the Venturists? No, but I am full of perplexities, and the cravings I see will soon be for turning me out. You understand? I know some working folk know. So you did last year? No, she insisted, shaking her head, that was all different. But now I am in their world. I live with them, and they talk to me. One evening in the week I am at home for all the people I know in our buildings, men and women. Mrs. Hurd, you know who I mean? Her brow contracted a moment. She comes with her sewing to keep me company. So does Edith Craven, and sometimes the little room is packed. The men smoke, when we can have the windows open, and I believe I shall soon smoke too. It makes them talk better. We get all sorts, socialists, conservatives, radicals. And you don't think much of the socialists? Well, they are the interesting dreamy fellows, she said, laughing. Who don't save and muddle their lives, and, as for argument, the socialist workman doesn't care two pence for facts that don't suit him. It's superb the way he treats them. I should like to know who does care, said Wharton with a shrug. Then he turned with his back to the parapet, the better to command her. He had taken off his hat for coolness, and the wind played with the crisp curls of hair. But tell me, he went on, who has been tampering with you? Is it Halon? You told me you saw him often? Perhaps. But what if it's everything, living, saving your presence? A year ago at any rate the world was all black or white, to me. Now I lay awake at night puzzling my head about the shades between, which makes the difference. A compulsory eight hours day for all men in all trades. Her note of scorn startled him. You know you won't get it. And all the other big, exasperating things you talk about. Public organization of labor and the rest. You won't get them till all the world is a new Jerusalem. And when the world is a new Jerusalem, nobody will want them. Wharton made her an ironical vow. Nicely said. We have heard it before. Upon my word you have marched. Or Edward Halon has carried you. So now you think the poor are as well off as possible, in the best of all possible worlds. Is that the result of your nursing? You agree with Denny, in fact, the man who got up after me? His tone annoyed her. Then suddenly the name suggested to her a recollection that brought a frown. That was the man, then. You attacked in the Clarion this morning. Ah! You read me! Said Wharton with sudden pleasure. Yes. That opened the campaign. As you know, of course, Craven has gone down and the strike begins next week. Soon we shall bring two batteries to bear, he letting fly as a correspondent and I from the office. I enjoyed writing that article. So I should think, she said dryly. All I know is it made one reader passionately certain that there was another side to the matter. There may not be, I daresay there isn't, but on me, at least, that was the effect. Why is it, she broke out with vehemence, that not a single labour paper is ever capable of the simplest justice to an opponent? You think any other sort of paper is any better? He asked her scornfully. I daresay not, but that doesn't matter to me. It is we who talk of justice, of respect, and sympathy from man to man. And then we go and blacken the men who don't agree with us. Whole classes, that is to say, of our fellow countrymen. Not in the old honest slashing style, tortues that we are, but with all the delicate methods of a new art of slander, pursued almost for its own sake. We know so much better always than our opponents. We hardly condescend even to be angry. And is only sorry, obliged to punish, like the priggish governess of one's childhood. In spite of himself, Wharton flushed. My best thanks, he said. Anything more, I prefer to take my drubbing all at once. She looked at him steadily. Why did you write, or allow, that article on the West Brookshire landlords two days ago? Wharton started. Well, wasn't it true? No, she said with a curling lip. And I think you know it wasn't true. What, as to the ray burns? Upon my word I should have imagined, he said slowly, that it represented your views at one time with tolerable accuracy. Her nerve suddenly deserted her. She bent over the parapet and, taking up a tiny stone that lay near, she threw it unsteadily into the river. He saw the hand shake. Look here, he said, turning round so that he too lent over the river, his arms on the parapet, his voice close to her ear. Are you always going to quarrel with me like this? Don't you know that there is no one in the world I would sooner please if I could? She did not speak. In the first place, he said, laughing, as to my speech, do you suppose that I believe in that bill which I described just now? I don't know, she said indignantly, once more playing with the stones on the wall. It sounded like it. That is my gift, my little carillon, as Renan would say. But do you imagine I want you or anyone else to tell me that we shan't get a bill for generations? Of course we shan't. Then why do you make barcical speeches, bamboozling your friends and misleading the House of Commons? He saw the old storm signs with glee, the lightning in the eye, the rose on the cheek. She was never so beautiful as when she was angry. Because, my dear lady, we must generate our force. Steam must be got up. I am engaged in doing it. We shan't get a compulsory eight hours day for all trades, but in the course of the agitation for that precious illusion, and by the help of a great deal of beating of tom-toms and gathering of clans, we shall get a great many other things by the way that we do want. Hearten your friends and frighten your enemies. There is no other way of scoring in politics, and the particular score doesn't matter. Now don't look at me as if you would like to impeach me, or I shall turn the tables. I am still fighting for my illusions in my own way. You, it seems, have given up yours. But for once he had underrated her sense of humor. She broke into a low, merry laugh, which a little disconcerted him. You mock me? He said quickly. Think me insincere, unscrupulous? Well, I daresay. But you have no right to mock me. Last year, again and again, you promised me, Gerdon, now it has come to paying, and I claim— His low, distinct voice in her ear had a magnetizing effect upon her. She slowly turned her face to him, overcome by, yet fighting against, memory. If she had seen in him the smallest sign of reference to that scene she hated to think of, he would have probably lost this hold upon her on the spot. But his tact was perfect. She saw nothing but a look of dignity and friendship, which brought upon her with a rush all the tragic things they had shared and fought through, purifying things of pity and fear which had so often seemed to her the atonement for, the washing away of that old baseness. He saw her face tremble a little. Then she said proudly, I promise to be grateful, so I am. No, no, he said still in the same low voice, you promised me a friend. Where is she? She made no answer. Her hands were hanging loosely over the water, and her eyes were fixed on the hay's opposite, whence emerged the blocks of the great hospital, and the twinkling points of innumerable lamps. But his gaze compelled her at last, and she turned back to him. He saw an expression half hostile, half moved, and pressed on before she could speak. Why do you bury yourself in that nursing life? He said dryly, it is not the life for you, it does not fit you in the least. You test your friends, she cried, her cheek flaming again at the provocative change of voice. What possible right have you to that remark? I know you, and I know the causes you want to serve. You can't serve them where you are. Nursing is not for you. You are wanted among your own class, among your equals, among the people who are changing and shaping England. It is absurd. You are masquerading. She gave him a little sarcastic nod. Thank you. I am doing a little honest work for the first time in my life. He laughed. It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or posing. You are just what you were in one respect, terribly in the right. Be a little humble tonight for a change. Come, condescend to the classes. Do you see Mr. Lane calling us? And in fact, Mr. Lane, with his arm in the air, was eagerly beckoning to them from a distance. Do you know Lady Selena Farrell, he asked her, as they walked quickly back to the dispersing crowd? No. Who is she? Wharton laughed. Providence should condrive to let Lady Selena overhear that question once a week in your tone. Well, she is a personage. Lord Alrasford's daughter, unmarried, rich, has a salon, or thinks she has, manipulates a great many people's fortunes and lies, or thinks she does, which, after all, is what matters to Lady Selena. She wants to know you badly. Do you think you can be kind to her? There she is. You will let me introduce you? She dines with us. In another moment, Marcella had been introduced to a tall, fair lady in a very fashionable black and pink bonnet who held out a gracious hand. I have heard so much of you, said Lady Selena, as they walked along the passage to the dining-room together. It must be so wonderful, your nursing. Marcella laughed rather restively. No, I don't think it is, she said, there are so many of us. Oh, but the things you do, Mr. Wharton told me, so interesting. Marcella said nothing, and as to her looks the passage was dark. Lady Selena thought her a very handsome but very gauche young woman. Still, gauche or not, she had thrown over Aldous Rayburn and thirty thousand a year, an act which, as Lady Selena admitted, put you out of the common run. Do you know most of the people dining, she inquired in her blandest voice? But no doubt you do. You are a great friend of Mr. Wharton's, I think. He stated our house last year, said Marcella abruptly, no, I don't know anybody. Then I should tell you, it makes it more interesting, doesn't it? It ought to be a pleasant little party. And the great lady lightly ran over the names. It seemed to Marcella that most of them were very smart or very important. Some of the smart names were vaguely known to her from Miss Rayburn's talk of last year, and besides there were a couple of Tory cabinet ministers and two or three prominent members. It was all rather surprising. At dinner she found herself between one of the cabinet ministers and the young and good-looking private secretary of the other. Both men were agreeable and very willing besides to take trouble with this unknown beauty. The minister, who knew the Rayburns very well, was discussing with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that story. His suspicion and curiosity were at any rate sufficiently strong to make him give himself much pains to draw her out. Her own conversation, however, was much distracted by the attention she could not help giving to her host and his surroundings. Wharton had Lainey Selina on his right and the young and distinguished wife of Marcella's minister on his left. At the other end of the table set Mrs. Lane, doing her duty spasmodically to Lord Alrasford, who still, in a blind old age, gave himself all the heirs of the current statesmen and possible premier. But the talk on the whole was general, a gay and careless give-and-take of parliamentary, social, and racing gossip, the ball flying from one accustomed hand to another. And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton's part in it. She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as her girl's fancy had seen him at Mellor, the solitary, eccentric figure pursued by the hatreds of a renounced patricianate, bringing the enmity of his own order as a pledge and offering to the plebes he asked to lead. Where even was the speaker of an hour ago? Chat of Ascot, Den of Newmarket. One with Lady Salina or with his left-hand neighbor of Country House Sets, with a patter of names which sounded in her scornful ear like a paragraph from the world, above all a general air of easy comradeship, which no one at this table at any rate seemed inclined to dispute, with every exclusiveness and every amusement of the idle rich, whereof, in the popular idea, he was held to be one of the very particular foes. No doubt as the dinner moved on the first impression changed somewhat. She began to distinguish notes that had at first been lost upon her. She caught the mocking, ambiguous tone under which she herself had so often fumed. She watched the occasional recoil of the women about him as though they had been playing with some soft-pawed animal and had been suddenly startled by the gleam of its claws. These things puzzled, partly propitiated her. But on the whole she was restless and hostile. How was it possible, from such personal temporizing, such a frittering of the forces and sympathies, to win the single-mindedness and the power without which no great career is built? She wanted to talk with him, reproach him. Well, I must go, worst luck, said Wharton at last, laying down his napkin and rising. Lane, will you take charge? I will join you outside, later. If he ever finds us, said her neighbor to Marcella, I never saw the place so crowded it is odd how people enjoy these scrambling meals in these very ugly rooms. Marcella, smiling, looked down with him over the bare coffee tavern place in which their party occupied a sort of high table across the end, while two other small gatherings were accommodated in the space below. Are there any other rooms than this, she asked idly. One more, said a young man across the table, who had been introduced to her in the dusk outside, and had not yet succeeded in getting her to look at him as he desired. But there's another big party there tonight. Rayburn, you know. He went on innocently, addressing the minister. He has got the winter-borns and the McDonald's quite a gathering, rather an unusual thing for him. The minister glanced quickly at his companion. But she had turned to answer a question from Lady Selena and thenceforward till the party rose. She gave him little opportunity of observing her. As the outward-moving stream of guests were once more in the corridor leading to the terrace, Marcella hurriedly made her way to Mrs. Lane. I think, she said, I'm afraid, we ought to be going, my friend and I. Perhaps Mr. Lane, perhaps he would just show us the way out, we can easily find a cab. There was an imploring, urgent look in her face which struck Mrs. Lane. But Mr. Lane's loud, friendly voice broke in from behind. Motherless voice, we can't possibly allow it. No, no. Just half an hour, while they bring us our coffee, to do your homage, you know, to the terrace and the river and the moon. And then, if you don't want to go back to the house for the division, we will see you safely into your cab. Look at the moon and the tide! They had come to the wide door opening on the terrace. Aren't they doing their very best for you? Marcella looked behind her in despair. Where was Edith? Far in the rear, and fully occupied, apparently, with two or three pleasant companions. She could not help herself. She was carried on with Mr. Lane chatting beside her, though the sight of the shining terrace, with its moonlit crowd of figures, breathed into her a terror and pain she could hardly control. Come and look at the water, she said to Mr. Lane. I would rather not walk up and down it if you don't mind. He thought she was tired, and politely led her through the sitting or promenading groups till once more she was leaning over the parapet, now trying to talk, now to absorb herself in the magic of bridge, river, and sky, but in reality listening all the time with a shrinking heart for the voices and the footfalls that she dreaded. Only winter-born above all, how unlucky! It was only that morning that she had received a forwarded letter from that old friend, asking urgently for news and her address. Well, how did you like the speech tonight? The speech, said Mr. Lane, a genial Gladstonean member, more heavily weighted with estates than with ideas. It was wondered, wasn't it, in the way of speaking. Speeches like that are a safety valve, that's my view of it. Have them out. These ideas? Get them discussed, with a good humor shake up the head for emphasis. Does nobody any harm and may do good, I can tell you, miss boys. The House of Commons is a capital place for taming these clever young men. You must give them their head, and they make excellent fellows after a bit. Why, who's this? My dear Lady Winter-born, this is a sight for Sareen. The portly member with great effusion grasped the hand of a stately lady in black whose abundant white hair caught the moonlight. Marcella cried a woman's voice. Yes, there he was, close behind Lady Winter-born. In the soft darkness he and his party had run upon the two persons talking over the wall without an idea, a suspicion. She hurriedly withdrew herself from Lady Winter-born, hesitated a second, then held out her hand to him. The light was behind him. She could not see his face in the darkness, but she was suddenly and strangely conscious of the whole scene of the great dark building with its lines of fairy-lit gothic windows, the blue gulf of the river crossed by lines of wavering light, the swift passage of a steamer with its illuminated saloon and crowded to deck, of the wonderful mixture of moonlight and sunset in the air and sky of this dark figure in front of her. Their hands touched. Was there a murmured word from him? She did not know. She was too agitated, too unhappy to hear it if there was. She threw herself upon Lady Winter-born in whom she divined at once a tremor almost equal to her own. Oh, do come with me, come away, I want to talk to you," she said incoherently under her breath, drawing Lady Winter-born with a strong hand. Lady Winter-born yielded bewildered and they moved along the terrace. Oh, my dear, my dear," cried the elder lady, to think of finding you here. How astonishing! How dreadful! No, I don't mean that. Of course, you and he must meet. But it was only yesterday. He told me he had never seen you again since. And it gave me a turn. I was very foolish just now, there now, just stay here a moment and tell me about yourself. And again they paused by the river. The girl, glancing nervously behind her as though she were in a company of ghosts. Lady Winter-born recovered herself and, Marcella looking at her, saw the old tragic severity of feature and mine blurned with the same softness, the same delicate tremor. Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter's feeling. She took up the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet and kissed it in the dark so that no one saw. I am glad to see you, she said passionately, so glad. Lady Winter-born was surprised and moved. But you have never written all these months, you unkind child. And I have heard so little of you, your mother never seemed to know. When will you come and see me? Or shall I come to you? I can't stay now, for we were just going. My daughter, Irmin and Trude Wellwin, has to take someone to a ball. How strange!" she broke off. How very strange that you and he should have met to-night! He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with Lord Maxwell. Yes, I had heard, said Marcella, more steadily. Will you come to tea with me next week? Oh, I will write, and we must go, too. Where can my friend be? She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith. I will take you back to the lanes, anyway, said Lady Winterburn, or shall we look after you? No, no, take me back to the lanes. Mama, are you coming? Said a voice like a softened version of Lady Winterburn's. Then something small and thin ran forward, and a girl's voice said piteously, Dear Lady Winterburn, my frock and my hair take so long to do. I shall be cross with my maid, and look like a fiend. Irmintrude will be sorry she ever knew me. Do come!" Don't cry, Betty, I certainly shan't take you if you do, said Lady Irmintrude, laughing. Mama, is this Miss Boyce, your Miss Boyce? She and Marcella shook hands, and they talked a little. Lady Irmintrude, under the cover of darkness, looking hard, and curiously at the tall stranger whom, as it happened, she had never seen before. Marcella had little notion of what she was saying. She was far more conscious of the girlish form hanging on Lady Winterburn's arm than she was of her own words. Of Betty's beautiful, soft eyes, also shyly and gravely fixed upon herself, under that marvellous cloud of fair hair the long, pointed chin, the whimsical little face. Well, none of you are any good, said Betty at last, in a tragic voice. I shall have to walk home my own poor little self, and ask a policeman. Mr. Rayburn! He disengaged himself from a group behind and came, with no alacrity. Betty ran up to him. Mr. Rayburn! Irmintrude and Lady Winterburn are going to sleep here, if you don't mind making arrangements, but I want a handsome. At that very moment Marcella caught sight of Edith strolling along towards her with a couple of members, and chatting as though the world had never rolled more evenly. Oh, there she is, there's my friend! cried Marcella to Lady Winterburn. Good night, good night! She was hurrying off when she saw Aldous Rayburn was standing alone a moment. The exasperated Betty had made a dart from his side to collect another straying member of the party. An impulse she could not master scattered her wretched discomfort, even her chafing sense of being the observed of many eyes. She walked up to him. Will you tell me about Lord Maxwell? She said in a tremulous hurry. I am so sorry he is ill. I hadn't heard a— She dare not look up. Was that his voice answering? Thank you. We have been very anxious about him, but the doctors today gave a rather better report. We take him abroad to-morrow. Marcella at last! cried Edith Craven, catching hold of her friend. You lost me? Oh, nonsense! It was all the other way. But look! There's Mr. Wharton coming out. I must go. Come and say good night. Everybody is departing. Aldous Rayburn lifted his hat. Marcella felt a sudden rush of humiliation, pain, sore resentment. That cold, strange tone, those unwilling words. She had gone up to him, as undisciplined in her repentance as she had been in aggression, full of a passionate yearning to make friends, somehow to convey to him that she was sorry in the old child's phrase which her self-willed childhood had used so little. There could be no misunderstanding possible. He of all men knew best how irrevocable it all was. But why, when life has brought reflection, and you realized at last that you have vitally hurt perhaps maimed another human being, should it not be possible to fling conventions aside and go to that human being with a frank confession by which all the promises of ethics and religion ought to bring peace, peace and a soothed conscience? But she had been repulsed, put aside so she took it, and by one of the kindest and most generous of men. She moved along the terrace in a maze, seeing nothing, biting her lip to keep back the angry tears. All that obscure need, that new stirring of moral life within her, which had found issue in this little futile advance towards a man who had once loved her and could now it seemed only despise and dislike her, was beating and swelling storm-like within her. She had taken being loved so easily, so much as a matter of course. How was it that it hurt her now so much to have lost love and power and consideration? She had never felt any passion for Aldous Rayburn, had taken him lightly and shaken him off with a minimum of remorse, yet tonight, a few cold words from him, the proud manner of a moment, had inflicted a smart upon her she could hardly bear, they had made her feel herself so alone, unhappy, uncared for. But on the contrary, she must be happy, must be loved, to this and this only had she been brought by the hard experience of this strenuous year. Oh, Mr. Lane be an angel, exclaimed Wharton's voice, just one turn, five minutes, the division will be called directly and then we will all thank our stars and go to bed. In another instant he was at Marcella's side, bare-headed, radiant, reckless even, as he was want to be in moments of excitement. He had seen her speak to Rayburn as he came out on the terrace, but his mind was too full for any perception of other people's situations, even hers. He was absorbed with himself and with her as she fitted his present need. The smile of satisfied vanity, of stimulated ambition was on his lips, and his good humor inclined him more than ever to Marcella and the pleasure of a woman's company. She passed with ease from triumph to homage, his talk now audacious, now confiding, offered her a deference, a flattery to which, as he was fully conscious, the events of the evening had lent a new prestige. She too in his eyes had triumphed, had made her mark. His ears were full of the comments made upon her tonight by the little world on the terrace. If it were not for money, hateful money, what more brilliant wife could be desired for any rising man. So the five minutes lengthened into ten, and by the time the division was called, and Wharton hurried off, Marcella, soothed, taken out of herself, rescued from the emptiness and forlornness of a tragic moment, had given him more conscious cause than she had ever given him yet, to think her kind and fair. CHAPTER X My dear Ned, do be reasonable. Your sister is in despair, and so am I. Why do you torment us by staying on here in the heat, and taking all these engagements which you know you are no more fit for than? A sick grasshopper laughed Holland, healthy wretch, did heaven give you that sunburn only that you might come home from Italy and Twitter's weaklings? Do you think I want to look as rambastrous as you? Nothing too much, my good friend. Aldous looked down upon the speaker, with an anxiety quite untouched by Holland's chaff. Miss Holland tells me, he persisted, that you are wearing yourself out with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now, rest, and begin again in the winter? Holland smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly joined in front of him. I doubt whether I shall live through the winter, he said quietly. Rayburn started. Holland in general spoke of his health when he allowed it to be mentioned at all in the most cheerful terms. Why you should behave as though you wished to make such a prophecy true, I can't conceive, he said in impatient pain. Holland offered no immediate answer, and Rayburn, who was standing in front of him, leaning against the woodwork of the open windows, looked unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes, cherry lucida templa, the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness. Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy, said Holland at last, putting out a thin hand and touching his friend. I shall give up soon. Moreover it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with their evenings in July, than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures. I shall go to the lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead, and I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh when no man can work. They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk, of the political situation, working class opinion, and the rest. Rayburn had been alive now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind. Holland's boy and youth had concerned itself almost entirely with positive crusades and enthousiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain current isms, and faiths, and the happy boyish tone of earlier years had become the stormy note of men contention tossed, which belongs indeed as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals. He had always been to some extent divided from Rayburn and others of his early friends by his passionate democracy, his belief in and trust of the multitude. For Holland the divine originating life was realized and manifested through the common humanity and its struggle as a whole. For Rayburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually, the rest remaining an inscrutable problem which did not indeed prevent faith, but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the friendship of these two in the least. But the developing alienation between Holland and hundreds of his working men friends was of an infinitely keener and sore kind. Since he had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, socialist ideas of all kinds had made great way in Britain, and on the whole as the prevailing type of them grew stronger, Holland's sympathy with them had grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant self-realization, and the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which logically aimed at doing away with it than the abuse of other human powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away with, say, love or religion. To give property, and therewith, the fuller human opportunity to those that have none was the inmost desire of his life. And not merely common property, though like all true soldiers of the human cause, he believed that common property will be in the future enormously extended, but in the first place and above all to distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them already. And that not for wealth's sake, though a more equal distribution of property and therewith of capacity must inevitably tend to wealth, but for the soul's sake and for the sake of that continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual heritage. How is it to be done? Holland, like many others, would have answered for England, mainly by a fresh distribution of the land, not of course by violence, which only means the worst form of waste known to history, but by the continuous pressure of an emancipating legislation relieving land from shackles long since struck off other kinds of property by the assertion within a certain limited range of communal initiative and control and above all by the continuous private effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of men of goodwill. For all sweeping uniform schemes, he had the natural contempt of the student or the moralist to imagine that by nationalizing 60 annual millions of rent, for instance, you could make England a city of God, was not only a vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A nation is not saved so cheaply, and to see those energies turned to land nationalization or the scheming of a collectivist millennium, which might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men, women, and children of today, to moralizing the employer's view of his prophet and the landlord's conception of his estate, filled him with a growing despair. The relation of such a habit of life in mind to the collectivist and socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other European country, is obvious enough. To Holland, the social life, the community, was everything, yet to be a socialist, seemed to him more and more to be a traitor. He would have built his state on the purified will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a state worth having, but for purification there must be effort, and for effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be forever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him, could never do without them, if man was to be man, so that he saw it all subspecial eternities. As a matter not of economic theory, but rather of religion, Rayburn, as they talked, shrank in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not with anger or contempt, but with a passionate sorrow which seemed to Rayburn preposterous, intolerable. To be exhausting in him the very springs and sources of a too precarious life, there rose in alders at last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and affection as any hamausion of old? Had they not already cost him love, were they also in another fashion to cost him his friend? Ah, dear fellow, enough, said Hollen at last. Take me back to Italy. You have told me so little, such a nickardly little. I told you that we went, and I came back in a water spout. Said Alders, the first rain in northern Italy for four months, worse luck. Rain at Regio, rain at Parma, at Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain. That might about stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty MacDonald and I, descended on Milan and climbed the Duomo. Did Miss Betty amuse you? Alders laughed. Well, at least she varied the program. The greater part of our day in Milan, Aunt Netta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo square, running like a deer, and presently, to Aunt Netta's horror, we discovered that she was pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with the pair, she was inquiring in her best Italian where the senior got his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in hand, was explaining to the seniorina that if she would but follow him round the corner to his military tailors, she could be supplied on the spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt Netta. She bought a small shipload of stuff, and then positively skipped for joy in the street outside. The amazed officer looking on, and as for her career over the roof of the Duomo, the agitation of it nearly brought my aunt to destruction, and even I heaved a sigh of relief when I got them both down safe. Is the creature all tricks? said Hollin, with a smile. As you talk of her to me, I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a barrel organ. Oh, but the monkey has so much heart! said Aldous, laughing again, as everyone was apt to laugh who talked about Betty MacDonald. And it makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across, especially with old maids. It amounts to genius Betty's way with old maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel salon at night. A perfect ring of them, and the men outside totally neglected and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade, a governess, or a school girl, or a lumpish boy, that she did not devote herself to that somebody. It is a pretty instinct. I have often wondered if it is nature or art. He fell silent, still smiling. Hollin watched him closely, perhaps the thought which had risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign or other to Aldous. For suddenly Rayburn's expression changed. The overstrenuous harassed look, which of late had somewhat taken the place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared. I did not tell you, Hollin, he begun in a low voice, raising his eyes to his friend, that I had seen her again. Hollin paused for a moment, then he said, No, I knew she went to the house to hear Wharton's speech, and that she dined there. I supposed she might just have come across you, but she said nothing. Of course I had no idea, said Aldous. Suddenly Lady Winterburn and I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was with that man's party. She spoke to me afterwards. I believe now she meant to be kind. His voice showed the difficulty he had in speaking at all, but I saw him coming up to talk to her, and I am ashamed to think of my own manner, but I could not help myself. His face and I took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow. Rayburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce, but Hollin had all along held two faiths about the matter. First, that Aldous was still possessed by a passion which had become part of his life. Secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in him an exceedingly bitter sense of ill usage of a type which Hollin had not perhaps expected. Did you see anything to make you suppose, he asked quietly after a pause, that she is going to marry him? No, no, Aldous repeated slowly, but she is clearly unfriendly, perhaps intimate terms with him, and just now, of course, she is more likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success of a kind in the house a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come rapidly to the front, so I understand, I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that group are too unmanageable. If he were a Parnell, but he lacks just the qualities that matter, the reticence, the power of holding himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard self-concentration, Aldous raised his shoulders. I don't imagine there's a lack of that, but certainly he holds himself aloof from nothing and nobody. I hear of him everywhere. What? Among the smart people. Aldous nodded. A change of policy by all accounts, said Hollin, musing. He must do it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be cupwad, all at once. Oh, dear, no! said Aldous dryly. He does it with intention. Nobody supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same, I think he may very well overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of and its influence. Have you been following the strike leaders in the clarion? No! cried Hollin, flushing. I would not read them for the world. I might not be able to go on giving to the strike. Aldous fell silent, and Hollin presently saw that his mind had harked back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest friendship, Hollin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella Boyce, never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything connected with her, but his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let him follow his own conviction. Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times, while you have been away, he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter. Aldous hesitated. Then he said, Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her? Hollin made a face. Since when has she become a person likely to be satisfied with anything? She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy. When she comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much I could cry over her. Aldous started. I don't know what you mean, he said, as he too rose and laid his hand on Hollin's for a moment. But don't tell me. It's best for me not to talk of her. If she were associated in my mind with any other man than Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off. But this, this he broke off, then resumed, while he pretended to look for a parcel he had brought with him by way of covering an agitation he could not suppress. A person you and I know said to me the other day. It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had thrown me over, except with ill will. The word astonished me, but somehow I understand it. I find myself full of anger to their most futile, their most ridiculous degree. He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his own breach of reticence. Hollin laid his hands on the taller man's shoulders, and there was a short pause. Never mind old fell, said Hollin, simply at last, as his hands dropped. Let's go and do our work. What is it you're after? I forget. Alders found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again, meanwhile in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hollin for a morning visit, meaning to spend some hours before the house met in the investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane. The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and regulation. There had been a great conflict of evidence, and Alders had finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of things in two or three selected streets. It was a matter on which Hollin was also well informed and felt strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hollin eagerly directing Rayburn's attention to the two or three points where he thought the government could really do good. Then Rayburn turned to go. I shall come and drag you out tomorrow afternoon, he said as he opened the door. You needn't, said Hollin with a smile. In fact, don't. I shall have my jaunt. Whereby Alders understood that he would be engaged in his common Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one or the other of the schools, of which he was manager, for a walk or to see some sight. If it's your boys, he said protesting, you are not fit for it, hand them over to me. Nothing of the sort, said Hollin gaily, and turned him out of the room. Rayburn found the walk from Hollin's Bloomsbury Quarters to Drury Lane hot and airless. The plains were already drooping and yellowing in the squares. The streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic of Hallbourne and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering in its roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already disappeared from the too short London summer. For Rayburn, on this particular afternoon, there was a curious forlorness in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun or the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of tune, whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested him considerably, or his parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home. He was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather, the certainty that this dear and honoured life with which his own had been so closely intertwined since his boyhood was drawing to its close weighed upon him now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an object on which affection checked and thwarted elsewhere was still free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender, and as for those other changes to which the first great change must lead. His transference to the upper house and the extension for himself of all the ceremonial side of life, he looked forward to them with an intense and resentful repugnance as to aggravations perversely thrust on him from without of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less happily in democracy than Aldous Rayburn. On the other hand, few men felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality. He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street, and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and box-making workshops in the Drury Lane District, to which the attention of the department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner crossed Hallbourne than he saw his man waiting for him, a small strip of a fellow with a dark bearded face, and a man of which shyness had made a trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the Undersecretary a slight preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two walked on together talking. The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion, first of all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were already marked for demolition, a black street bearing a peculiarly vile reputation in the neighborhood. It contained on the whole the worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Rayburn's notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary. After ten minutes' walk, they turned into the street, with its condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless. Its narrow roadways strewn with coasters refuse. It was largely inhabited by coasters frequenting Covent Garden Market. Its filthy gutters and broken pavements, it touched indeed a depth of sinister squalor beyond most of its fellows. The air was heavy with odors which, in this July heat, seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and decaying, and the children squatting or playing amid the garbage of the street were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human type. A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear. I gave him your name, he said briefly, in answer to Rayburn's interrogative look, when he returned, and told him what we're after. The street is not quite as bad as it was, and there are little oases of respectability in it you would never expect, but there is plenty of the worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course now you see it at its dull moment. Tonight the place will swarm with barrels and stalls. All the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the school board visitor of these spots, and the city missionary too, who is afraid of nothing. Unstanding still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left, he began in his shy, monotonous voice, to run through the inhabitants of some of the houses under few typical histories. This group was mainly peopled by women of the lowest class and their bullies. That is to say the man who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering, the stranger who fell into their claws. In that house, a woman had been slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers, under every circumstance of tragic horror. In the next, a case of flagrant and revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had been brought to light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink. There were gin palaces at all the corners. The women drank in proportion to their resources as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own. When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further end of the street, and a house on the right-hand side. Behind the veil of his official manor, Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and heard, as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough. But his companion, a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of big wigs, was conscious only of the trained man of affairs, courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity. Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood still and looked about them. There was a star in the street, windows had been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead alive before, was full of a running and shouting crowd. It's a fight, said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. Listen, shrieks of the most ghastly and piercing note rang through the air. The men and women who rushed past the two strangers, hustling them, yet too excited to notice them, were all making for a house some ten or twelve yards in front of them to their left. Ardors turned white. It's a woman, he said, after an instant's listening, and it sounds like murder. You go back for that policeman, and without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way through it by the help of arms and shoulders, which in ten years gone by had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink sodden men and screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him. The noise from within was appalling. Crys, groans, uproar, all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall, then the sound of a voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying piteously and as though in exhaustion. Help! Almost at the same moment the door, which Ardors and his companions were trying to force, was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be shot out from the dark passage inside, two wrestling with a third, a wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink and splashed with blood. He is done for her, shouted one of the captors, and for the sister too. The sister shrieked a woman behind Ardors. It's the nurse he means. I saw her go in when I were at my window half an hour ago. Oh, you blackered you! And she would have fallen upon the wretch in a frenzy had not the bystanders caught hold of her. Stand back, cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's call. The man was instantly secured and the crowd pushed back. Ardors was already upstairs. Which room? He asked a group of women crying and cowering on the first landing, for all the sounds from above had ceased. Third floor front, cried one of them. We all of us begged and implored of that young person, sir, not to go near him. Didn't we Betsy? Didn't we doll? Ardors ran up. On the third floor the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on the ground, apparently beaten to death. By her side, torn, disheveled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity. Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left arm hung as though disabled by her side, but with the right hand she was doing her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag stood open beside her and one of the chattering women was handing her what she asked for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on Rayburn's heart. In such an exaltation of nerve she could be surprised at nothing. When she saw Rayburn enter the room she did not even start. I think she said as he stooped down to her, speaking with pauses as though to get her breath. He has killed her, but there is a chance. Are the police there and a stretcher? Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then noticing Marcella's nursing dress and her cloak, he came up to her respectfully. Did you see it, Miss? I tried to separate them. She replied, still speaking with the same difficulty, while she silently motioned to Alders, who was on the other side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the bandage she was applying. But he was such a great, powerful brute. Alders, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and tried to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his. I was downstairs, she went on, while the constable took out his notebook, attending a child that's ill when I heard the screams. They were on the landing. He had turned her out of the room, then rushed after her. I think to throw her downstairs. I stopped that. Then he took up something. Oh, there it is! She shuddered, pointing to a broken piece of a chair which lay on the floor. He was quite mad with drink. I couldn't do much. Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note. Isn't your arm hurt? said Alders, pointing to it. It's not broken. It's wrenched. I can't use it. There, that's all we can do, till she gets to hospital. Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and was proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag and quietly pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the deep line of pain farrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little. Then she sank down on the floor again, beside her patient, gazing at the woman's marred face, indescribably patient in its deep unconsciousness, at the gnarled and blood-stained hands with their wedding ring, at the thin locks of torn grey hair, with tears that ran unheated down her cheeks in a passion of anguished pity, which touched a chord of memory in Rayburn's mind. He had seen her look so before, beside Minta Hart, on the day of Hart's capture. At the same moment he saw they were alone. The policeman had cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse before his companion returned, with a stretcher, in asking the names and evidence of those of the inmates of the house on the stairs outside. You can't do anything more, said Aldous gently bending over her. Won't you let me take you home? You want it sorely. The police are trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help. They will remove her with every care he will see to it. Then, for the first time, her absorption gave way. She remembered who he was, where they were, how they had met last, and with their remembrance came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness. She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her, any more, after this. When at the White House she had got herself into disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would silently set up a headache, or a cut finger, that she might be pitied, and so perforce forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now. No, after this he must be friends with her. I will just help her downstairs, she said, but with a quivering, appealing accent, and so they fell silent. Aldous looked round the room, at the miserable, filthy carrot, with its begrimed and peeling wallpaper, its two or three broken chairs, its heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed, its empty gin bottles here and there, all the familiar, one might almost say, conventionalized, signs of human ruin and domination, then at this breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling was one of fears and natural protest against circumstance, against her mother, against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the finest and fragileest things of a poorly furnished world into such a hopeless struggle with devildom. I have been here several times before, she said, presently, in a faint voice, and there has never been any trouble. By day the street is not much worse than others, though of course it has a bad name. There is a little boy on the next floor, very ill with typhoid. Many of the women in the house are very good to him and his mother. This poor thing used to come in and out when I was nursing him. Oh, I wish, I wish they would come. She broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form. Every moment is of importance. As Alders went to the door to see if the stretcher were inside, it opened and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the lifting of the blood-stained head. The police obeyed her with care and skill. Then Rayburn assisted in the carrying downstairs and presently the police with their burden and accompanied apparently by the whole street were on their way to the nearest hospital. Then Alders, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police who had just come up was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her as to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning against the passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand and seemed to him on the point of fainting. Get a cab at once, will you? He said peremptorily to Peabody. Then, going to the inspector, he drew him forward. They exchanged a few words. The inspector lifted his cap and Alders went back to Marcella. There is a cab here, he said to her. Come, please, directly. They will not trouble you any more for the present. He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the cab. As they drove along he felt every jolt and roughness of the street, as though he were himself in anguish. She was some time before she recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab. Her breath came fast and he could see that she was trying hard to control herself and not faint. He too restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was this what her new career, her enthusiasm, mean or might mean? 23. In the prime of youth, of charm, horrible, unpardonable waste, he could not bear it and could not submit himself to it. Oh, let her marry Horton, or anyone else, so long as it were made impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such scenes, such gross physical abominations. Amazing how meanly, passionately, timorous the man of Rayburn's type can be for the woman. He himself may be morally ever a fighter and feel the glow, the stern joy of the fight. But she let her leave the human brute and his unsavory struggle alone. It cannot be borne. It was never meant that she should dip her delicate wings of her own free will, at least, in such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had possessed him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison the night in the cottage. In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely. Presently, as he watched her, hating the man for driving and the cab for shaking, he saw her white lips suddenly smile. I know, she said, rousing herself to look at him. You think nursing is all like that. I hope not, he said, with effort, trying to smile too. I never saw a fight before, she said, shutting her eyes again. Nobody is ever rude to us. I often pine for experiences. How like her old wild tone, his rigid looks often involuntarily. Well, you have got one now, he said, bending over to her. Does your arm hurt much? Yes, but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have to give up work for a bit. Mr. Rayburn? Yes, his heart beat. We may meet often, may entwee, at Lady Winterburn's or in the country. Couldn't we be friends? You don't know how often, she turned away her weary head a moment, gathered strength to begin again. How often I have regretted last year. I see now that I behaved more unkindly. Her voice was almost a whisper, and I thought then. But it is all done with. Couldn't we just be good friends, understand each other, perhaps better than we ever did? She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring. As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was really in his mind was the terrace, was Horton's advancing figure, but her state, the moment coerced him. We could not be anything but friends, he said gently, but with astonishing difficulty, and then could find nothing more to say. She knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled. She put out her hand. No, she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a shudder. Oh no! Then suddenly a passion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leaned against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her self-control, gasping in coherent things about the woman she had not been able to save. He tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrong, but she hardly heard him. At last they turned into Main Street, and she saw the gateway of Brown's buildings. Here we are, she said faintly, summoning all her will. Do you know you will have to help me across the court and upstairs? Then I shan't be any more trouble. So leaning on Rayburn's arm, Marcella made her slow progress across the court of Brown's buildings, and through the gaping groups of children. Then, at the top of her flight of steps, she withdrew herself from him with a one smile. Now I am home, she said. Goodbye. Alders looked round him well at Brown's buildings, as he departed. Then he got in a handsome and drove to Lady Winterburn's house, and implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best cleverness to hide all motion of his in the matter, after which he spent, poor Alders, one of the most restless and miserable nights of his life. End of Book 3, Chapter 10 of Marcella, read by Liz Delosu. Section 37 Book 3, Chapter 11 Marcella was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair at the open window of Lady Winterburn's drawing-room. The house in James Street, Buckingham Gate, looked out over the exercising ground of the great barracks in front, and commanded the greenery of St. James Park to the left. The plains lining the barrack railings were poor, wilted things, and London was as hot as ever. Still the charm of these open spaces of sky and park, after the high walls and innumerable windows of Brown's buildings, was very great. Marcella wanted nothing more, but to lie still, to dally with a book, to dream as she pleased, and to be let alone. Lady Winterburn and her married daughter Lady Ermond Trude were still out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon. Marcella had her thoughts to herself, but they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days, after Lady Winterburn had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house, had been so pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy, cyber-ridic temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had been here a fortnight and was now pining to go back to work. Her mood was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place among the rich and important people of this world. Far away beyond these parks and palaces in the little network of dark streets she knew lay the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her heart was somehow wrestling. Must somehow wrestle, its passionate way. But her wrenched arm was still in a sling and was moreover undergoing treatment at the hands of a clever specialist, and she could neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her nursing. A state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent and moody. On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she paid to the woman whose life it now appeared she had saved, probably at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go scarred and maimed through what remained to her of existence. But she lived, and as Marcella and Lady Winterborne and Rayburn had abundantly made up their minds would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future. Alas! There were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest. She had been woefully disappointed, nigh wounded, as to the results of that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her and Aldous Rayburn. He had called two or three times since she had been with Lady Winterborne. He had done his best to make her inevitable appearance as a witness in the police court as easy to her as possible. The man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had been formal and constrained. There had been little conversation, and she had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange if not unseemly advance of which he must think unkindly, since he had let it count with him so little. Childishly angry she wanted him to be friends. Why shouldn't he? He would certainly marry Betty MacDonald in time, whatever Mr. Hallon might say. Then why not put his pride away and be generous? Their future lives must have necessity touch each other, for they were bound to the same neighborhood, the same spot of earth. She knew herself to be her father's heiress. Malor must be hers some day, and before that, whenever her father's illness, of which she now understood the incurable, though probably tedious, nature, should reach a certain stage, she must go home and take up her life there again. Why embitter such a situation? Make it more difficult for everybody concerned. Why not simply bury the past and begin again? In her restlessness she was inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he. Meanwhile, in the winter-born household she was living among people to whom Aldous Rayburn was a dear and familiar companion who admired him with all their hearts and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his private life and his public career. Their circle, too, was his circle, and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and colleagues. Whether in the ministry or the house, the result was a number of new impressions which she half-resented as we may resent the information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of Rayburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious surprise. She could not explain it, as she had so often tackately explained his place in Berkshire by the mere accidents of birth. After all, aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men by any other criterion than personal profitableness, and a man nowadays is in the long run personally profitable far more by what he is than by what he has so far at least has progress brought us. She saw then that this quiet, strong man with his obvious defects of temperament and manner had already gained a remarkable degree of consideration using the word in its French sense among his political contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried. While yet his name was comparatively little known to the public, Marcella indeed had gathered her impression from the most slight and various sources, mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work of England. Above all things did she love and admire power. The power of personal capacity it had been the secret, it was still half the secret of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a kind of unwillingness. All the same, Rayburn took a new place in her imagination. Then, apart from the political world in its judgments, the intimacy between him and the Winterborne family showed her to him in many new aspects. To Lady Winterborne, his mother's dear and close friend, he was almost a son, and nothing could be more charming than the affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little oddities and weaknesses, and to all her children he was bound by the memories and kindnesses of many years. He was the godfather of Lady Ermond Trude's child, the hero and counselor of the two sons, who were both in Parliament. Anne took his lead in many things, while there was no one with whom Lord Winterborne could more comfortably discuss county or agricultural affairs. In the old days, Marcella had somehow tended to regard him as a man of few friends, and in a sense it was so. He did not easily yield himself, and was often thought dull and apathetic by strangers. But here, amid these old companions, his delicacy and sweetness of disposition had full play, and although now that Marcella was in their house, he came less often, and was less free with them than usual, she saw enough to make her wonder a little that they were also kind and indulgent to her, seeing that they cared so much for him, and all that affected him. Well, she was often judged, humbled, reproached, yet there was a certain irritation in it. Was it all her own fault that in her brief engagement she had realized him so little? Her heart was sometimes oddly sore, her conscience full of smart. But there were moments when she was as combative as ever, nor had certain other experiences of this past fortnight been any more soothing to this sore, craving sense of hers. It appeared very soon that nothing would have been easier for her had she chosen than to become the lion of the later season. The story of the Baton Street tragedy had, of course, got into the papers, and had been treated there with the usual adornments of the new journalism. The world which knew the Rayburns, or knew of them, comparatively a large world, fell with avidity on the romantic juxtaposition of names, to lose your betrothed, as all this Rayburn had lost his, and then to come across her again in this manner, and in these circumstances there was a dramatic neatness about it to which the careless fate that governs us too seldom attains. London discussed the story a good deal, and would have liked dearly to see and to exhibit the heroine. Mrs. Lane in particular, the hostess of the House of Commons dinner, felt that she had claims, and was one of the first to call it Lady Winterborn's and see her guest. She soon discovered that Marcella had no intention whatever of playing the lion, and must in fact avoid excitement and fatigue. But she had succeeded in getting the girl to come to her once or twice of an afternoon to meet two or three people. It was better for the wounded arm that its owners should walk than drive, and Mrs. Lane lived at a convenient distance, at a house in Piccadilly just across the Green Park. Here then, as in James Street, Marcella had meant in discreet succession a few admiring and curious persons, and had tasted some of the smaller sweets of fame. But the magnet that drew her to the Lane's House had been no craving for notoriety. At the present moment she was totally indifferent to what perhaps constitutionally she might have liked. The attraction had been simply the occasional presence there of Harry Wharton. He excited, puzzled, angered, and commanded her more than ever. She could not keep herself away from the chance of meeting him. And Lady Winterborn neither knew him nor apparently wished to know him, a fact which probably tended to make Marcella obstinate. Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings? Again and again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women, with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms. While with all of them he talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent live their life, the contradiction of the House of Commons evening returned upon her perpetually. She thought she saw, in many of his new friends, a certain malicious triumph in the readiness with which the young demagogue had yielded to their bates. No doubt they were at least as much duped as he. Like Helen she did not believe that at bottom he was the man to let himself be held by silk and bonds if it should be to his interest to break them. But meanwhile his varying among these people, the claims they and their amusement made upon his time and his mind, seemed to this girl who watched them with her dark, astonished eyes, a kind of treachery, to his place and his cause. It was something she had never dreamed of, and it roused her contempt and irritation. Then as to herself he had been all eagerness in his inquiries after her from Mrs. Lane, and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing room that he did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of appropriation which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and Marcella sometimes resented. On the other hand, things jarred between them frequently. From day to day he varied. She had dreamt of a great friendship, but instead it was hardly possible to carry on the thread of their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust. On the terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed him, as a lover. When they meant again at Mrs. Lane's he would be sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein. Sometimes she thought even cool. Nye once or twice he was guilty of curious little neglects toward her, generally in the presence of some great lady or other. On one of these occasions she suddenly felt herself flushing from brow to chin at the thought. He does not want any one to suppose for a moment that he wishes to marry me. It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects of that one moment's fancy. Till then it is the simple truth to say that she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him. When it did enter her mind she saw that it had already entered his, and that he was full of doubts. The perception had given to her manner and increasing aloofness and pride, which had of late peaked Wharton into efforts from which vanity and indeed something else could not refrain if he was to preserve his power. So she was sitting by the window this afternoon, in a mood which had in it neither simplicity nor joy. She was conscious of a certain dull and baffled feeling, a sense of humiliation which hurt. Moreover the scene of sordid horror she had gone through haunted her imagination perpetually. She was unstrung and the world weighed upon her. The pity, the ugliness, the confusion of it. The muslin curtain, beside her, suddenly swelled out in a drought of air, and she put out her hand quickly to catch the French window lest it should swing, too. Someone had opened the door of the room. Did I blow you out of window? said a girl's voice, and there behind her, in a half-timid attitude, stood Betty MacDonald, a vision of white muslin, its frills and capes a little tossed by the wind, the pointed face and golden hair showing small and elf-like under the big, shady hat. Oh, do come in, said Marcella Shiley. Lady Winterbourne will be in directly. So Patton told me, said Betty, sinking down on a high stool beside Marcella's chair and taking off her hat. And Patton doesn't tell me any stories now. I've trained him. I wonder how many he tells in the day. Don't you think there will be a special little corner of purgatory for London butlers? I hope Patton will get off easy. Then she laid her sharp chin on her tiny hand and studied Marcella. Miss Boyce was in the light black dress that Minta approved. Her pale face and delicate hands stood out from it with a sort of noble emphasis. When Betty had first heard of Marcella Boyce as the heroine of a certain story, she had thought of her as a girl one would like to meet. Even only to prick her somehow for breaking the heart of a good man. Now that she saw her close, she felt herself near to falling in love with her. Moreover, the incident of the fight and of Miss Boyce's share in it had thrilled a creature all susceptibility and curiosity, and the little merry thing would sit hushed, looking at the heroine of it. Odd by the thought of what a girl only two years older than herself must have already seen of sin and tragedy, envying her with all her heart. And by contrast, honesty despising, for the moment, that very happy and popular person, Betty MacDonald. Do you like being alone? She asked Marcella abruptly. Marcella coloured. Well, I was just getting very tired of my own company, she said. I was very glad to see you come in. What are you? said Betty joyously, with a little gleam in her pretty eyes. Then suddenly the golden head bent forward. May I kiss you? she said in the wistfulest, eagerness voice. Marcella smiled, and laying her hand on Betty's shyly drew her. That's better, said Betty, with a long breath. That's the second milestone. The first was when I saw you on the terrace. Couldn't you mark all your friendships by little white stones? I could. But the horrid thing is, when you have to mark them back again, nobody ever did that with you. Because I have no friends, said Marcella quickly. Then when Betty clapped her hands in amazement at such a speech, she added quickly with a smile. Except a few I make poultices for. There, said Betty inbiously, to think of being really wanted, for poultices or anything I never was wanted in my life. When I die they'll put on my poor little grave. She's buried here, that hissy-beddy. She did not good, said only fret ye. Oh, there you are! she ran to the window. Lady Winterborne in Irmintrude, doesn't it make you laugh to see Lady Winterborne doing her duties? She gets into a carriage after lunch, as one might mount a tumble. I expect to hear her tell the coachman to drive to the scaffold at Hyde Park Corner. She looks the unhappiest woman in England, and all the time Irmintrude declares she likes it, and wouldn't do without her season for the world. She gives Irmintrude a lot of trouble, but she is a dear, a naughty dear, and mothers are such a chance. Irmintrude, where did you get that bonnet? You got it without me, and my feelings won't stand it. Lady Irmintrude and Betty threw themselves on a sofa together, chattering and laughing. Lady Winterborne came up to Marcella and inquired after her. She was still slowly drawing off her gloves when the drawing room door opened again. Tea-patten! said Lady Winterborne, without turning her head, and in the tone of Lady Macbeth, but the magnificent butler took no notice. Lady Selena Farrell! he announced in a firm voice. Lady Winterborne gave a nervous start. Then, with the air of a person cut out of wood, made a slight advance and held out a limp hand to her visitor. Won't you sit down? she said. Anybody who did not know her would have supposed that she had never seen Lady Selena before. In reality she and the Owersfords were cousins. But she did not like Lady Selena, and never took any pains to conceal it, a fact which did not in the smallest degree interfere with the younger lady's performance of her family duties. Lady Selena found a seat, with easy a plume, put up her bejeweled fingers to draw off her veil, and smilingly prepared herself for tea. She inquired of Betty, how she was enjoying herself, and of Lady Ermentrude, how her husband and baby in the country were getting on without her. The tone of this last question made the person addressed flush and draw herself up. It was put as banter, but certainly conveyed that Lady Ermentrude was neglecting her family for the sake of dissipations. Betty, meanwhile, curled herself up in a corner of the sofa, letting one pretty foot swing over the other, and watching the newcomer with a malicious eye which instantly and gleefully perceived that Lady Selena thought her attitude ungraceful. Marcella, of course, was greeted and contolled with. Lady Selena, however, had seen her since the tragedy, and then Lady Winterborne, after every item of her family news, and every symptom of her own and her husband's health had been rigorously inquired into, began to attempt some feeble questions of her own. How, for instance, was Lord Aursford's gout? Lady Selena replied that he was well but much depressed by the political situation. No doubt ministers had done their best, but he thought two or three foolish mistakes had been made during the session. Certain blunders ought had all hazards to have been avoided. He feared that the party in the country might have to pay dearly for them, but he had done his best. Lady Winterborne, whose eldest son was a junior whip, had been the recipient, since the advent of the new cabinet, of so much rejoicing over the final exclusion of that vain old idiot Aursford from any further chances of muddling a public department, that Lady Selena's talk made her at once nervous and irritable. She was afraid of being indiscreet, yet she longed to put her visitor down. In her odd disjointed way, too, she took a real interest in politics. Her craving idealist nature, mated with a cheery sportsman husband who laughed at her, yet had made her happy, was always trying to reconcile the ends of internal justice with the measures of the Tory party. It was a task of Sisyphus, but she would not let it alone. I do not agree with you, she said with cold shyness and answer to Lady Selena's concluding laments. I am told, our people say, we are doing very well, except that the session is likely to be dreadfully long. Lady Selena raised both her eyebrows and her shoulders. Dear Lady Winterbourne, you really mean it. She said with the indulgent incredulity one shows to the simple minded. But just think, the session will go on. Everyone says till quite the end of September. Isn't that enough of itself to make a party discontented? All our big measures are in dreadful arrears. And my father believed so much of the friction might have been avoided. He is all in favour of doing more for LeBore. He thinks these label men might have been easily propitiated without anything revolutionary. It's no good supposing that these poor, starving people will wait for ever. Oh! said Lady Winterbourne, and sat staring at her visitor. To those who knew its author well, the monosyllable could not have been more expressive. Lady Winterbourne's sense of humour had no voice, but inwardly it was busy with Lord Albersford as the friend of the poor, Albersford, the narrowest and niggeredliest, tyrant alive. So far as his own servants in his state were concerned, and as to Lady Selina, it was well known to the Winterbourne cousinship that she could never get a maid to stay with her for six months. What did you think of Mr. Wharton's speech the other night? said Lady Selina, bending suavely across the tea-table to Marcella. It was very interesting, said Marcella stiffly, perfectly conscious that the name had pricked the attention of everybody in the room, and angry with her cheeks for reddening. Wasn't it? said Lady Selina, heartily. You can't do those things, of course, but you should show every sympathy to the clever, enthusiastic young men, the men like that, shouldn't you? That's what my father says. He says we've got to win them, we've got somehow to make them feel us their friends, or we shall all go to ruin. They have the voting power, and we are the party of education, of refinement. If we can only lead that kind of man to see the essential justice of our calls, and at the same time give them our help, in reason, show them we want to be their friends, wouldn't it be best? I don't know whether I put it rightly. You know so much about these things. But we can undo sixty-seven, can't we? We must get round it somehow, mustn't we? And my father thinks ministers so unwise, but perhaps. And Lady Selina drew herself back with a more gracious smile than ever. I ought not be saying these things to you. Of course, I know you used to think us conservatives very bad people, but Mr. Wharton tells me, perhaps you don't think quite so hardly of us, as you used. Lady Selina's head, in its Paris bonnet, fell to one side in a gentle and a rogative sort of way, something roused in Marcella. Our cause, she repeated, while the dark eye dilated. I wonder what you mean. Well, I mean, said Lady Selina, seeking for the harmless word, in the face of this unknown explosive-looking girl. I mean, of course, the cause of the educated, of the people who have made the country. I think, said Marcella quietly, you mean the cause of the rich, don't you? Marcella! cried Lady Winterbourne, catching at the tone rather than the words. I thought you didn't feel like that any more, not about the distance between the poor and the rich, and our tyranny, and its being hopeless, and the poor always hating us, I thought you changed. And forgetting Lady Selina, remembering only the old talks at Malore, Lady Winterbourne bent forward and laid in a peeling hand on Marcella's arm. Marcella turned to her with an odd look. If you only knew, she said, how much more possible it is to think well of the rich when you are living amongst the poor. Ah! you must be at a distance from us to do us justice! inquired Lady Selina, settling her bracelets with a sarcastic lip. I must, said Marcella, looking, however, not at her, but at Lady Winterbourne. But then you see, she caressed her friend's hand with a smile. It is so easy to throw some people into opposition. Dreadfully easy, sighed Lady Winterbourne. The flush mounted again in the girl's cheek. She hesitated, then felt driven to explanations. You see, oddly enough, she pointed away for an instant to the north-east, through the open window. It's when I'm over there, among the people who have nothing, that it does me good to remember that there are persons who live in James Street, Buckingham Gate. My dear! I don't understand! said Lady Winterbourne, studying her with a most perplexed and tragic air. Well, isn't it simple? said Marcella, still holding her hand and looking up at her. It comes, I suppose, of going about all day in those streets and houses, and among people who live in one room, with not a bit of prettiness anywhere, and no place to be alone in, or to rest in. I come home in gloat over all the beautiful dresses and houses and gardens I can think of. But don't you hate the people that have them? said Betty again on her stool, chin in hand. No! it doesn't seem to matter to me then what kind of people they are, and I don't so much want to take from them and give to the others. I only want to be sure that the beauty and the leisure and the freshness are somewhere, not lost out of the world. How strange! In a life like yours, the one should think so much of the ugliness of being poor, more than of suffering or pain! said Betty Musing. Well, in some moods you do. I do, said Marcella, and it is in those moods that I feel least resentful of wealth, if I say to myself that the people who have all the beauty and the leisure are often selfish and cruel, after all they die out of their houses and their parks and their pictures and time, like the shellfish out of its shell, the beauty and the grace which they created or inherited remain, and why should one be envious of them personally? They have had the best chances in the world and thrown them away. Are but poor animals at the end. At any rate, I can't hate them. They seem to have a function. When I am moving about Drury Lane, she added with a smile. But how can one help but being ashamed? said Lady Winterborne, as her eyes wandered over her pretty room, and she felt herself driven somehow into playing devil's advocate. No, no, said Marcella eagerly. Don't be ashamed. As to the people who make beauty more beautiful, who share it and give it, I often feel as if I could stay to them on my knees, never, never be ashamed merely of being rich, of living with beautiful things and having time to enjoy them, one might as well be ashamed of being strong rather than a cripple or having two eyes rather than one. Oh, but my dear! cried Lady Winterborne, piteous and bewildered, when one has all the beauty and the freedom and other people must die without any— Oh, I know, I know! said Marcella with a quick gesture of despair. That's what makes the world the world, and one begins with thinking it can be changed, that it must and shall be changed, that everybody could have wealth, could have beauty and rest and time to think, that is to say if things were different, if one could get socialism, if one could beat down the capitalist, if one could level down and level up till everybody had two hundred a year. One turns and fingers the puzzle all day long. It seems so near coming right. One guesses a hundred ways in which it might be done. Then after a while one stumbles upon doubt. One begins to see that it never will, never can come right. Not in any mechanical way of that sort. That that isn't what was meant. Her voice dropped drearily. Mary MacDonald gazed at her with a girl's nascent adoration. Lady Winterbourne was looking puzzled and unhappy, but absorbed like Betty in Marcella. Lady Selena, studying the three with smiling composure, was putting on her veil, with the most careful attention to fringe and hairpins, as for Ermond Trude, she was no longer on the sofa. She had risen noiselessly, finger on lip almost to the beginning of Marcella's talk, to agree to visit her. She and he were standing at the back of the room, in the opening of the conservatory, and noticed by any of the group in the bow window. Don't you think, said Lady Selena, airily, her white fingers still busy with her bonnet, that it would be a very good thing to send all the radicals, the well-to-do radicals, I mean, to live among the poor. It seems to teach people such extremely useful things. Marcella straightened herself as though someone had touched her impertently. She looked around quickly. I wonder what you suppose it teaches. Well, said Lady Selena, a little taken aback and hesitating. Well, I suppose it teaches a person to be content, and not to cry for the moon. You think, said Marcella slowly, that to live among the poor can teach anyone, anyone that's human, to be content. Her manner had the unconscious intensity of emphasis, the dramatic force that came to her from another blood than ours. Another woman could hardly have fallen into such a tone without affectation, without pose. At this moment, certainly Betty, who was watching her, acquitted her of either, and warmly thought her a magnificent creature. Lady Selena's feeling simply was, that she had been roughly addressed by her social inferior, she drew herself up. As I understand you, she said stiffly, you yourself confessed that to live with poverty had led you to think more reasonably of wealth. Suddenly a movement of Lady Irmintroods made the speaker turn her head. She saw the pair at the end of the room, looked astonished, then smiled. Why, Mr. Rayburn, where have you been hiding yourself during this great discussion, most consoling, wasn't it, on the whole, to us West End people? She threw back a keen glance at Marcella. Lady Irmintrood and Rayburn came forward. I made him be quiet, said Irmintrood, not looking, however, quiet at her ease. It would have been a shame to interrupt. I think so, indeed, said Lady Selena with emphasis. Goodbye, dear Lady Winterborne. Goodbye, Miss Boyce. You have comforted me very much. Of course, one is sorry for the poor, but it is a great thing to hear from anybody who knows as much about it as you do that, after all, it is no crime to possess a little. She stood, smiling, looking from the girl to the man, then escorted by Rayburn in his very stiffest manner. She swept out of the room. When all this came back, with a somewhat slow and hesitating step, he approached Marcella, who was standing silent by the window, and asked after the lame arm. He was sorry, he said, to see that it was still in its sling. His tone was a little abrupt. Only Lady Winterborne saw the quick nervousness of the eyes. Oh, thank you. said Marcella coldly. I shall get back to work next week. She stooped and took up her book. I must please go and write some letters. She said in answer to Lady Winterborne's flurried look, and she walked away. Betty and Lady Ermond Trude also went to take off their things. Oldest, said Lady Winterborne, holding out her hand to him. He took it, glanced unwillingly at her wistful, agitated face, pressed the hand and let it go. Isn't it sad? said his old friend, unable to help herself, to see her battling like this with life, with thought, all alone. Isn't it sad, Oldest? Yes, he said. Then after a pause. Why doesn't she go home? My patience gives out when I think of Mrs. Boyce. Oh, it isn't Mrs. Boyce's fault, said Lady Winterborne hopelessly, and I don't know why one should be sorry for her particularly. Why one should want her to change her life again? She does it splendidly. Only I never, never feel that she is a bit happy in it. It was Helen's cry over again. He said nothing for a moment, then he forced to smile. Well, neither you nor I can help it, can we, he said. The gray eyes looked at her steadily, bitterly. Lady Winterborne, with the sensation of one who looking for softness, has lid on granite, changed the subject. Meanwhile, Marcella, upstairs, was walking restlessly up and down. She could hardly keep herself from rushing off back to Brown's buildings at once. He, in the room, while she was saying those things, Lady Selina's words burnt in her ears. Her morbid, irritable sense was all one vibration of pride and revolt. Apology, appeal, under the neatest comedy guise. Of course, now that Lord Maxwell was dying, and the ill-used suitor was so much the nearer to his earldom. A foolish girl had repented her of her folly. Was anxious to make those concerned understand. What more simple? Her nerves were strained and out of gear. Tears came in a proud, passionate gush, and she misneeds allow herself the relief of them. Meanwhile, Lady Selina had gone home, full of new and uncomfortable feelings. She could not get Marcella Boyce out of her head. Neither has she had just seen her under the wing of that foolish woman Madeline Winterbone, nor has she had seen her first on the terrace with Harry Wharton. It did not please Lady Selina to feel herself in any way eclipsed or even rivaled by such an unimportant person as this strange and ridiculous girl, yet it crossed her mind with a stab as she lay resting on the sofa in her little sitting-room before dinner, that never in all her thirty-five years had any human being looked into her face with the same alternations of eagerness and satisfied pleasure she had seen on Harry Wharton's as he and Miss Boyce strolled the terrace together, nor even with such a look as that silly baby Betty MacDonald had put on as she sat on the stool at the heroine's feet. There was to be a small dinner party at Owersford House that night. Wharton was to be among the guests. He was fast becoming one of the habitues of the house and would often stay behind to talk to Lady Selina when the guests were gone and Lord Owersford was dozing peacefully in a deep armchair. Lady Selina lay still in the evening light, and led her mind which worked with extraordinary shrewdness and force in the grooves congenial to it, run over some possibilities of the future. She was interrupted by the entrance of her maid, who with a quickened breath and heightened color she could not repress when speaking to her formidable mistress, told her that one of the younger housemaids was very ill. Lady Selina inquired, found that the doctor who always attended the servants had been sent for, and thought that the illness might turn to rheumatic fever. Oh! Send her off to the hospital at once, said Lady Selina. Let Mrs. Stewart see Dr. Briggs first thing in the morning, and make arrangements. You understand. The girl hesitated, and the candle she was lighting showed that she had been crying. If your ladyship would but let her stay, she said timidly. We'd all take our turns at nursing her. She comes from Ireland. Perhaps she'll remember, my lady. She's no friends in London, and she's frightened to death of going to the hospital. That's nonsense, said Lady Selina sternly. Do you think I can have all the work of the house put out because someone is ill? She might die even. What never knows? Just tell Mrs. Stewart to arrange with her about her wages, and to look out for somebody else at once. The girl's mouth set sullenly as she went about her work. Put out the shining satin dress, the jewels, the hairpins, the curling irons, the various powders and cosmetics that were wanted for Lady Selina's toilette, and all the time there was ringing in her ears. The piteous cry of a little Irish girl clinging like a child to her only friend. Oh, Marie, dear Marie, do get her to let me stay. I'll do everything the doctor tells me. I'll make haste and get well. I'll give her trouble. And it's all along of the work. And the damp up in these rooms, the doctor said so. An hour later Lady Selina was in the stately drawing-rooms of Oursford House, receiving her guests. She was out of sorts and temper, and the Wharton arrived in due time, and she had the prospect to enliven her during dinner. When he was of necessity parted from her by people of higher rank, of a tete-a-tete with him, before the evening was over, the dinner went heavily. The duke on her right hand and the dean on her left were equally distasteful to her, neither food nor wine had saved her, and once, in an interval of talk, she caught sight of her father's face in form at the further end, growing more vacant and crepit week by week. She was seized with a sudden angry pang of revolt and repulsion. Her father wearied and disgusted her. Life was often trist and dull in the Great House, yet when the old man should have found his grave she would be a much smaller person than she was now, and the days would be so much more tedious. Wharton too showed less than his usual animation. She said to herself at dinner that he had the face of a man in want of sleep. His young, brilliant look was somewhat tarnished and there was worry in the restless eye, and indeed she knew that things had not been going so favourably for him in the House of Late, that the stubborn opposition of the little group of men led by Wilkins was still hindering that concentration of the party and definition of his own foremost place in it which had looked so close and probable a few weeks before. She supposed he had been exhausting himself, too, over that shocking midland strike. The Clarion had been throwing itself into the battle of the men with a monstrous violence for which she had several times reproached him. When all the guests had gone but Wharton, and Lord Owersford duly placed for the sake of propriety in his accustomed chair, was safely asleep, Lady Selina asked what was the matter? Oh, the usual thing! He said as he leant against the mantelpiece beside her. The world's a poor place, and my doles stuffed with sawdust. Did you ever know any doll that wasn't? She looked up at him a moment without speaking. Which means, she said, that you can't get your way in the House? No, said Wharton meditatively, looking down at his boots. No, not yet. You think you will get it some day? He raised his eyes. Oh, yes! He said. Oh, dear yes! Some day. She laughed. You'd better come over to us. Well, there is always that to think of, isn't there? You can't deny, you want all the new blood you can get. If you only understood your moment and your chance, she said quickly, you would make the opportunity and do it at once. He looked at her aggressively. How easy it comes to you, Tories, to rat, he said. Thank you. It only means that we are the party of common sense. Well, I've been talking to your Miss Boys. He started. Where? At Lady Winterbourne's. Aldous Rayburn was there. Your beautiful Socialist was very interesting, and rather surprising. She talked of advantages of wealth, said she had been converted by living among the poor, had changed her mind, in fact, on many things. We were all much edified, including Mr. Rayburn. How long do you suppose that business will remain off? To my mind, I never saw a young woman more eager to undo a mistake. Then she added slowly. The accounts of Lord Maxwell get more and more unsatisfactory. Wharton stared at her with sparkling eyes. How little you know her, he said, not without a tone of contempt. Oh, very well, said Lady Selina with the slightest shrug of her white shoulders. He turned to the mantle-piece and began to play with some ornaments upon it. Tell me. She said, he inquired presently, Lady Selina gave her own account of the conversation. Wharton recovered himself. Dear me, he said when she stopped. Yes. Well, we may see another act. Who knows? Well, good night, Lady Selina. She gave him her hand with her usual aristocrats' passivity, and he went. But it was late indeed, that night, before she ceased to speculate on what the real effect of her words had been upon him. As for Wharton, on his walk home he thought of Marcella Boyce, and of Rayburn, with a certain fever of jealous vanity which was coming, he told himself, dangerously near to passion. He did not believe, Lady Selina, but nevertheless he felt that her news might drive him into rash depths he could ill afford, and had indeed been doing his best to avoid. Meanwhile it was clear to him that the mistress of Albersford House had taken an envious dislike to Marcella. How plain she had looked tonight in spite of her gorgeous dress, and how intolerable Lord Albersford grew.