like a penitent
child. Aldous, astonished and alarmed by her emotions and by the wild
incoherent things she said, won his way at last to some moments of
divine happiness, when, leaving her trembling hand in his, she sat
submissively beside him, gradually quieting down, summoning back her
smiles and her beauty, and letting him call her all the fond names he
would.

CHAPTER VIII.

Scarcely a word was exchanged between Marcella and her mother on the
drive home. Yet under ordinary circumstances Marcella's imagination
would have found some painful exercise in the effort to find out in what
spirit her mother had taken the evening--the first social festivity in
which Richard Boyce's wife had taken part for sixteen years. In fact,
Mrs. Boyce had gone through it very quietly. After her first public
entry on Lord Maxwell's arm she had sat in her corner, taking keen note
of everything, enjoying probably the humours of her kind. Several old
acquaintances who had seen her at Mellor as a young wife in her first
married years had come up with some trepidation to speak to her. She had
received them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had gone
away under the impression that she regarded herself as restored to
society by this great match that her daughter was making. Lady
Winterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; and
both Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested in
smoothing the effort to her as much as they could. She meanwhile watched
Marcella--except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she did
not see--and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and to
Hallin.

Yet all through she was preoccupied, and towards the end very anxious
to get home, a state of mind which prevented her from noticing
Marcella's changed looks after her reappearance with Aldous in the
ball-room, as closely as she otherwise might have done. Yet the mother
_had_ observed that the end of Marcella's progress had been somewhat
different from the beginning; that the girl's greetings had been
gentler, her smiles softer; and that in particular she had taken some
pains, some wistful pains, to make Hallin talk to her. Lord
Maxwell--ignorant of the Wandle incident--was charmed with her, and
openly said so, both to the mother and Lady Winterbourne, in his hearty
old man's way. Only Miss Raeburn held indignantly aloof, and would not
pretend, even to Mrs. Boyce.

And now Marcella was tir