ling for composure--that she might not
excite him too much.

"Besides, it would be absurd! You forget I have seen a good deal of Mr.
Raeburn lately--while I have been with the Winterbournes. He has
entirely given up all thought of me. Even my vanity could see that
plainly enough. His best friends expect him to marry a bright,
fascinating little creature of whom I saw a good deal in James Street--a
Miss Macdonald."

"Miss how--much?" he asked roughly.

She repeated the name, and then dwelt, with a certain amount of
confusion and repetition, upon the probabilities of the matter--half
conscious all the time that she was playing a part, persuading herself
and him of something she was not at all clear about in her own inner
mind--but miserably, passionately determined to go through with it all
the same.

He bore with what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet
also half incredulous. He had always been obstinate, and the approach of
death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised
the bodily frame. He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some
way yet of testing the matter in spite of her. He would think it out.

Meanwhile, step by step, she brought the conversation to less dangerous
things, and she was finally gliding into some chat about the
Winterbournes when he interrupted her abruptly--

"And that other fellow--Wharton. Your mother tells me you have seen him
in London. Has he been making love to you?"

"Suppose I won't be catechised!" she said gaily, determined to allow no
more tragedy of any kind. "Besides, papa, you can't read your gossip as
good people should. Mr. Wharton's engagement to a certain Lady Selina
Farrell--a distant cousin of the Winterbournes--was announced, in
several papers with great plainness three weeks ago."

At that moment her mother came in, looking anxiously at them both, and
half resentfully at Marcella. Marcella, sore and bruised in every moral
fibre, got up to go.

Something in the involuntary droop of her beautiful head as she left the
room drew her father's eyes after her, and for the time his feeling
towards her softened curiously. Well, _she_ had not made very much of
her life so far! That old strange jealousy of her ability, her beauty,
and her social place, he had once felt so hotly, died away. He wished
her, indeed, to be Lady Maxwell. Yet for the moment there was a certain
balm in the idea that she too--her mother's daughter--wit