d him. He glanced at her surreptitiously
from time to time, but he could make nothing of her. She sat very quiet
while he described the constant companionship between Aldous and Betty,
and the evident designs of Miss Raeburn. Just as when he made his first
confidences to her in London, he was vaguely conscious that he was doing
a not very gentlemanly thing. But again, he was too unhappy to restrain
himself, and he longed somehow to make an ally of her.

"Well, I have only one thing to say," she said at last, with an odd
nervous impatience--"go and ask her, and have done with it! She might
have some respect for you then. No, I won't help you; but if you don't
succeed, I'll pity you--I promise you that. And now you must go away."

He went, feeling himself hardly treated, yet conscious nevertheless of a
certain stirring of the moral waters which had both stimulus and balm in
it.

She, left behind, sat quiet in the old library for a few lonely minutes.
The boy's plight made her alternately scornful and repentant of her
sharpness to him. As to his report, one moment it plunged her in an
anguish she dared not fathom; the next she was incredulous--could not
simply make herself take the thing as real.

But one thing had been real--that word from Aldous to her of
"_marriage_"! The nostril dilated, the breast heaved, as she lost all
thought of Frank in a resentful passion that could neither justify nor
calm itself. It seemed still as though he had struck her. Yet she knew
well that she had nothing to forgive.

* * * * *

Next morning she went down to the village meaning to satisfy herself on
two or three points connected with the new cottages. On the way she
knocked at the Rectory garden-door, in the hope of finding Mary Harden
and persuading her to come with her.

She had not seen much of Mary since their return. Still, she had had
time to be painfully struck once or twice with the white and bloodless
look of the Rector's sister, and with a certain patient silence about
her which seemed to Marcella new. Was it the monotony of the life? or
had both of them been overworking and underfeeding as usual? The Rector
had received Marcella with his old gentle but rather distant kindness.
Two years before he had felt strongly about many of her proceedings, and
had expressed himself frankly enough, at least to Mary. Now he had put
his former disapprovals out of his mind, and was only anxious to work
s