new gropings after God. Just as the light was going she got up
hurriedly and went to her writing-table. She wrote a little note, sat
over it a while, with her face hidden in her hands, then sealed,
addressed, and stamped it. She went out herself to the hall to put it in
the letter-box. For the rest of the evening she went about in a state of
dream, overcome sometimes by rushes of joy, which yet had in them
exquisite elements of pain; hungering for the passage of the hours, for
sleep that might cancel some of them; picturing the road to the Court
and Widrington, along which the old postman had by now carried her
letter--the bands of moonlight and shade lying across it, the quiet of
the budding woods, and the spot on the hillside where he had spoken to
her in that glowing October. It must lie all night in a dull office--her
letter; she was impatient and sorry for it. And when he got it, it would
tell him nothing, though she thought it would rather surprise him. It
was the merest formal request that he would, if he could, come and see
her again the following morning on business.

During the evening Mrs. Boyce lay on the sofa and read. It always still
gave the daughter a certain shock of surprise when she saw the slight
form resting in this way. In words Mrs. Boyce would allow nothing, and
her calm composure had been unbroken from the moment of their return
home, though it was not yet two months since her husband's death. In
these days she read enormously, which again was a new trait--especially
novels. She read each through rapidly, laid it down without a word of
comment, and took up another. Once or twice, but very rarely, Marcella
surprised her in absent meditation, her hand covering the page. From the
hard, satiric brightness of her look on these occasions it seemed
probable that she was speculating on the discrepancies between fiction
and real life, and on the falsity of most literary sentiment.

To-night Marcella sat almost silent--she was making a frock for a
village child she had carried off from its mother, who was very ill--and
Mrs. Boyce read. But as the clock approached ten, the time when they
generally went upstairs, Marcella made a few uncertain movements, and
finally got up, took a stool, and sat down beside the sofa.

* * * * *

An hour later Marcella entered her own room. As she closed the door
behind her she gave an involuntary sob, put down her light, and hurrying
up to t