the spectacle of what is, would have been a more possible one!--so it
had often seemed to him.

But to-night all this cumbering consciousness, all these self-made
doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away! A
transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot--a man once more
young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at
last through all his being the ecstasy of a self-surrender, long missed,
long hungered for.

Six weeks was it since he had first seen her--this tall, straight,
Marcella Boyce? He shut his eyes impatiently against the disturbing
golds and purples of the sunset, and tried to see her again as she had
walked beside him across the church fields, in that thin black dress,
with, the shadow of the hat across her brow and eyes--the small white
teeth flashing as she talked and smiled, the hand so ready with its
gesture, so restless, so alive! What a presence--how absorbing,
troubling, preoccupying! No one in her company could forget her--nay,
could fail to observe her. What ease and daring, and yet no hardness
with it--rather deep on deep of womanly weakness, softness, passion,
beneath it all!

How straight she had flung her questions at him!--her most awkward
embarrassing questions. What other woman would have dared such
candour--unless perhaps as a stroke of fine art--he had known women
indeed who could have done it so. But where could be the art, the
policy, he asked himself indignantly, in the sudden outburst of a young
girl pleading with her companion's sense of truth and good feeling in
behalf of those nearest to her?

As to her dilemma itself, in his excitement he thought of it with
nothing but the purest pleasure! She had let him see that she did not
expect him to be able to do much for her, though she was ready to
believe him her friend. Ah well--he drew a long breath. For once,
Raeburn, strange compound that he was of the man of rank and the
philosopher, remembered his own social power and position with an
exultant satisfaction. No doubt Dick Boyce had misbehaved himself
badly--the strength of Lord Maxwell's feeling was sufficient proof
thereof. No doubt the "county," as Raeburn himself knew, in some detail,
were disposed to leave Mellor Park severely alone. What of that? Was it
for nothing that the Maxwells had been for generations at the head of
the "county," i.e. of that circle of neighbouring families connected by
the ties of ancestral friendship, or of