r
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 met again at Mrs. Lane's he would be
sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes,
she thought, even cool. Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious
little neglects towards 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 an
increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued 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 draught of air,
and she put out her hand quickly to catch the French window lest it
should swing to. Some one 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