ouse. The _role_ of your Socialist aristocrat, of your
land-nationalising landlord, is a very telling one."

"And comparatively easy," said Aldous, "when you know that neither
Socialism nor land-nationalisation will come in your time!"

"Oh! so you think him altogether a windbag?"

Aldous hesitated and laughed.

"I have certainly no reason to suspect him of principles. His conscience
as a boy was of pretty elastic stuff."

"You may be unfair to him," said Hallin, quickly. Then, after a pause:
"How long is he staying at Mellor?"

"About a week, I believe," said Aldous, shortly. "Mr. Boyce has taken a
fancy to him."

They walked on in silence, and then Aldous turned to his friend in
distress.

"You know, Hallin, this wind is much too cold for you. You are the most
wilful of men. Why would you walk?"

"Hold your tongue, sir, and listen to me. I think your Marcella is
beautiful, and as interesting as she is beautiful. There!"

Aldous started, then turned a grateful face upon him.

"You must get to know her well," he said, but with some constraint.

"Of course. I wonder," said Hallin, musing, "whom she has got hold of
among the Venturists. Shall you persuade her to come out of that, do you
think, Aldous?"

"No!" said Raeburn, cheerfully. "Her sympathies and convictions go with
them."

Then, as they passed through the village, he began to talk of quite
other things--college friends, a recent volume of philosophical essays,
and so on. Hallin, accustomed and jealously accustomed as he was to be
the one person in the world with whom Raeburn talked freely, would not
to-night have done or said anything to force a strong man's reserve. But
his own mind was full of anxiety.

CHAPTER IV.

"I _love_ this dilapidation!" said Wharton, pausing for a moment with
his back against the door he had just shut. "Only it makes me long to
take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other--plastering, or
carpentering, or painting. What useless drones we upper classes are!
Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor--to save
our lives."

They were in the disused library. It was now the last room westwards of
the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had
been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose
money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to
her English husband's birthplace. The roof had been raised and domed to
ma