round, all carried with
them a confused general impression of well-being and of dignity.
Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at the same
moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the end of the
avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on either side of the
lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting the broad gravel terrace
beneath her window.

"It _is_ a heavenly place, all said and done," she protested to herself
with a little frown. "But no doubt it would have been better still if
Uncle Robert had looked after it and we could afford to keep the garden
decent. Still--"

She dropped on a stool beside the open window, and as her eyes steeped
themselves afresh in what they saw, the frown disappeared again in the
former look of glowing content--that content of youth which is never
merely passive, nay, rather, contains an invariable element of covetous
eagerness.

It was but three months or so since Marcella's father, Mr. Richard
Boyce, had succeeded to the ownership of Mellor Park the old home of the
Boyces, and it was little more than six weeks since Marcella had
received her summons home from the students' boarding-house in
Kensington, where she had been lately living. She had ardently wished
to assist in the June "settling-in," having not been able to apply her
mind to the music or painting she was supposed to be studying, nor
indeed to any other subject whatever, since the news of their
inheritance had reached her. But her mother in a dry little note had let
it be known that she preferred to manage the move for herself. Marcella
had better go on with her studies as long as possible.

Yet Marcella was here at last. And as she looked round her large bare
room, with its old dilapidated furniture, and then out again to woods
and lawns, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her
childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out--atoned for by
this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so
deplorably!--since no one could have reasonably expected that an
apparently sound man of sixty would have succumbed in three days to the
sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted
successfully a score of times before.

Her great desire now was to put the past--the greater part of it at any
rate--behind her altogether. Its shabby worries were surely done with,
poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present
pos