e at the station, she begged them to write to
her.

"No, no!" said Louis, the handsome younger brother. "If ever you want
us, we are there. If you write, we will answer. But you won't need to
think about us yet awhile. Good-bye!"

And he pressed her hand with a smile.

The good fellow had put all his own dreams and hopes out of sight with a
firm hand since the arrival of her great news. Indeed, Marcella realised
in them all that she was renounced. Louis and Edith spoke with affection
and regret. As to Anthony, from the moment that he set eyes upon the
maid sent to escort her to Mellor, and the first-class ticket that had
been purchased for her, Marcella perfectly understood that she had
become to him as an enemy.

"They shall see--I will show them!" she said to herself with angry
energy, as the train whirled her away. And her sense of their
unwarrantable injustice kept her tense and silent till she was roused to
a childish and passionate pleasure by a first sight of the wide lawns
and time-stained front of Mellor.

* * * * *

Of such elements, such memories of persons, things, and events, was
Marcella's reverie by the window made up. One thing, however, which,
clearly, this report of it has not explained, is that spirit of
energetic discontent with her past in which she had entered on her
musings. Why such soreness of spirit? Her childhood had been pinched and
loveless; but, after all, it could well bear comparison with that of
many another child of impoverished parents. There had been compensations
all through--and were not the great passion of her Solesby days,
together with the interest and novelty of her London experience, enough
to give zest and glow to the whole retrospect? Ah! but it will be
observed that in this sketch of Marcella's schooldays nothing has been
said of Marcella's holidays. In this omission the narrative has but
followed the hasty, half-conscious gaps and slurs of the girl's own
thought. For Marcella never thought of those holidays and all that was
connected with them _in detail_, if she could possibly avoid it. But it
was with them, in truth, and with what they implied, that she was so
irritably anxious to be done when she first began to be reflective by
the window; and it was to them she returned with vague, but still
intense consciousness when the rush of active reminiscence died away.

* * * * *

That surely was the breakf