g 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--I--"

She dared not look up. Was that _his_ voice answering?

"Thank you. We have been very anxious about him; but the doctors to-day
give 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 is
Mr. Wharton coming out. I must go--come and say good-night--everybody is
departing."

Aldous Raeburn 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 realise 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 the frank confession which by 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 stormlike 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 Raeburn--had taken him lightly and shaken
him off with a minimum of remorse. Yet to-night a few cold words from
him--the proud mann