ction not to be plucked
out while the heart still beat. This act of indelicacy and injustice was
like many that had gone before it; and there was in it the same evasion
and concealment towards herself. No matter. She had made her account
with it all twenty years before. What astonished her was, that the force
of her strong coercing will had been able to keep him for so long within
the limits of the smaller and meaner immoralities of this world.

"Have you read the rest of the will?" she asked, after a long pause.

Marcella lifted it again, and began listlessly to go through it.

"Mamma!" she said presently, looking up, the colour flushing back into
her face, "I find no mention of you in it throughout. There seems to be
no provision for you."

"There is none," said Mrs. Boyce, quietly. "There was no need. I have my
own income. We lived upon it for years before your father succeeded to
Mellor. It is therefore amply sufficient for me now."

"You cannot imagine," cried Marcella, trembling in every limb, "that I
am going to take the whole of my father's estate, and leave
nothing--_nothing_ for his wife. It would be impossible--unseemly. It
would be to do _me_ an injustice, mamma, as well as yourself," she added
proudly.

"No, I think not," said Mrs. Boyce, with her usual cold absence of
emotion. "You do not yet understand the situation. Your father's
misfortunes nearly ruined the estate for a time. Your grandfather went
through great trouble, and raised large sums to--" she paused for the
right phrase--"to free us from the consequences of your father's
actions. I benefited, of course, as much as he did. Those sums crippled
all your grandfather's old age. He was a man to whom I was
attached--whom I respected. Mellor, I believe, had never been
embarrassed before. Well, your uncle did a little towards recovery--but
on the whole he was a fool. Your father has done much more, and you, no
doubt, will complete it. As for me, I have no claim to anything more
from Mellor. The place itself is"--again she stopped for a word of which
the energy, when it came, seemed to escape her--"hateful to me. I shall
feel freer if I have no tie to it. And at last I persuaded your father
to let me have my way."

Marcella rose from her seat impetuously, walked quickly across the room,
and threw herself on her knees beside her mother.

"Mamma, are you still determined--now that we two are alone in the
world--to act towards me, to treat me as t