urt you--I didn't indeed--it was all the other way--and
now I have."

She turned upon him laughing, but also half crying, as he could tell by
the flutter of her breath.

He vowed he was not hurt, and once more changed both talk and tone. They
reached the drive's end without a word of Wharton. But Marcella went to
bed hating herself, and Aldous, after his solitary drive home, sat up
long and late, feverishly pacing and thinking.

* * * * *

Then next evening how differently things fell!

Marcella, having spent the afternoon at the Court, hearing all the
final arrangements for the ball, and bearing with Miss Raeburn in a way
which astonished herself, came home full of a sense of duty done, and
announced to her mother that she was going to Mr. Wharton's meeting in
the Baptist chapel that evening.

"Unnecessary, don't you think?" said Mrs. Boyce, lifting her eyebrows.
"However, if you go, I shall go with you."

Most mothers, dealing with a girl of twenty-one, under the
circumstances, would have said, "I had rather you stayed at home." Mrs.
Boyce never employed locutions of this kind. She recognised with perfect
calmness that Marcella's bringing up, and especially her independent
years in London, had made it impossible.

Marcella fidgeted.

"I don't know why you should, mamma. Papa will be sure to want you. Of
course, I shall take Deacon."

"Please order dinner a quarter of an hour earlier, and tell Deacon to
bring down my walking things to the hall," was all Mrs. Boyce said in
answer.

Marcella walked upstairs with her head very stiff. So her mother, and
Miss Raeburn too, thought it necessary to keep watch on her. How
preposterous! She thought of her free and easy relations with her
Kensington student-friends, and wondered when a more reasonable idea of
the relations between men and women would begin to penetrate English
country society.

Mr. Boyce talked recklessly of going too.

"Of course, I know he will spout seditious nonsense," he said irritably
to his wife, "but it's the fellow's power of talk that is so
astonishing. _He_ isn't troubled with your Raeburn heaviness."

Marcella came into the room as the discussion was going on.

"If papa goes," she said in an undertone to her mother as she passed
her, "it will spoil the meeting. The labourers will turn sulky. I
shouldn't wonder if they did or said something unpleasant. As it is,
_you_ had much better not come, mamma. T