he bed, fell on her knees beside it and wept long. Yet her mother
had not been unkind to her. Far from it. Mrs. Boyce had praised her--in
few words, but with evident sincerity--for the courage that could, if
necessary, put convention aside; had spoken of her own relief; had said
pleasant things of Lord Maxwell; had bantered Marcella a little on her
social schemes, and wished her the independence to stick to them.
Finally, as they got up to go to bed, she kissed Marcella twice instead
of once, and said:

"Well, my dear, I shall not be in your way to-morrow morning; I promise
you that."

The speaker's satisfaction was plain; yet nothing could have been less
maternal. The girl's heart, when she found herself alone, was very sore,
and the depression of a past which had been so much of a failure, so
lacking in any satisfied emotion and the sweet preludes of family
affection, darkened for a while even the present and the future.

After a time she got up, and leaving her room, went to sit in a passage
outside it. It was the piece of wide upper corridor leading to the
winding stairs she had descended on the night of the ball. It was one of
the loneliest and oddest places in the house, for it communicated only
with her room and the little staircase, which was hardly ever used. It
was, indeed, a small room in itself, and was furnished with a few huge
old chairs with moth-eaten frames and tattered seats. A flowery paper of
last-century date sprawled over the walls, the carpet had many holes in
it, and the shallow, traceried windows, set almost flush in the outer
surface of the wall, were curtainless now, as they had been two years
before.

She drew one of the old chairs to a window, and softly opened it. There
was a young moon, and many stars, seen uncertainly through the rush of
April cloud. Every now and then a splash of rain moved the creepers and
swept across the lawn, to be followed by a spell of growing and
breathing silence. The scent of hyacinths and tulips mounted through the
wet air. She could see a long ghostly line of primroses, from which rose
the grey base of the Tudor front, checkered with a dim light and shade.
Beyond the garden, with its vague forms of fountain and sun-dial, the
cedars stood watching; the little church slept to her left.

So, face to face with Nature, the old house, and the night, she took
passionate counsel with herself. After to-night surely, she would be no
more lonely! She was going for e