mperceptible gradations--came a moist English smell. The air was damp
and warm. A convent bell tolled from invisible heights above the garden;
while the olives and vines close at hand were full of the chattering
voices of gardeners and children, and broken here and there by clouds of
pink almond-blossom. March had just begun, and the afternoons were fast
lengthening. It was little more than a fortnight since Mr. Boyce's
death. In the November of the preceding year Mrs. Boyce and Marcella had
brought him to Naples by sea, and there, at a little villa on Posilippo,
he had drawn sadly to his end. It had been a dreary time, from which
Marcella could hardly hope that her mother would ever fully recover. She
herself had found in the long months of nursing--nursing of which, with
quiet tenacity, she had gradually claimed and obtained her full share--a
deep moral consolation. They had paid certain debts to conscience, and
they had for ever enshrined her father's memory in the silence of an
unmeasured and loving pity.

But the wife? Marcella sorely recognised that to her mother these last
days had brought none of the soothing, reconciling influences they had
involved for herself. Between the husband and wife there had been dumb
friction and misery--surely also a passionate affection!--to the end.
The invalid's dependence on her had been abject, her devotion wonderful.
Yet, in her close contact with them, the daughter had never been able to
ignore the existence between them of a wretched though tacit
debate--reproach on his side, self-defence or spasmodic effort on
hers--which seemed to have its origin deep in the past, yet to be
stimulated afresh by a hundred passing incidents of the present. Under
the blight of it, as under the physical strain of nursing, Mrs. Boyce
had worn and dwindled to a white-haired shadow; while he had both clung
to life and feared death more than would normally have been the case.
At the end he had died in her arms, his head on her breast; she had
closed his eyes and performed every last office without a tear; nor had
Marcella ever seen her weep from then till now. The letters she had
received, mostly, Marcella believed, from her own family, remained
unopened in her travelling-bag. She spoke very little, and was
constantly restless, nor could Marcella as yet form any idea of the
future.

After the funeral at Naples Mrs. Boyce had written immediately to her
husband's solicitor for a copy of his will and