hat it was a misfortune to belong to him; and she would have
pitied her mother most heartily if her mother had ever allowed her the
smallest expression of such a feeling. As it was, she was left to wonder
and chafe at her mother's new-born mildness.

In the drawing-room, after luncheon, Hallin came up to Marcella in a
corner, and, smiling, drew from his pocket a folded sheet of foolscap.

"I made Aldous give me his speech to show you, before to-morrow night,"
he said. "He would hardly let me take it, said it was stupid, and that
you would not agree with it. But I wanted you to see how he does these
things. He speaks now, on an average, two or three times a week. Each
time, even for an audience of a score or two of village folk, he writes
out what he has to say. Then he speaks it entirely without notes. In
this way, though he has not much natural gift, he is making himself
gradually an effective and practical speaker. The danger with him, of
course, is lest he should be over-subtle and over-critical--not simple
and popular enough."

Marcella took the paper half unwillingly and glanced over it in silence.

"You are sorry he is a Tory, is that it?" he said to her, but in a lower
voice, and sitting down beside her.

Mrs. Boyce, just catching the words from where she sat with her work, at
the further side of the room, looked up with a double wonder--wonder at
Marcella's folly, wonder still more at the deference with which men like
Aldous Raeburn and Hallin treated her. It was inevitable, of
course--youth and beauty rule the world. But the mother, under no spell
herself, and of keen, cool wit, resented the intellectual confusion, the
lowering of standards involved.

"I suppose so," said Marcella, stupidly, in answer to Hallin's question,
fidgeting the papers under her hand. Then his curious confessor's gift,
his quiet questioning look with its sensitive human interest to all
before him, told upon her.

"I am sorry he does not look further ahead, to the great changes that
must come," she added hurriedly. "This is all about details,
palliatives. I want him to be more impatient."

"Great political changes you mean?"

She nodded; then added--

"But only for the sake, of course, of great social changes to come
after."

He pondered a moment.

"Aldous has never believed in _great_ changes coming suddenly. He
constantly looks upon me as rash in the things _I_ adopt and believe in.
But for the contriving, unceasing effo