more clever than was always quite agreeable to a
father whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him by
misfortune. Such a girl was sure to be admired. She would have
lovers--friends of her own. It seemed that already, while Lord Maxwell
was preparing to insult the father, his grandson had discovered that the
daughter was handsome. Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie,
wherein the Raeburns' behaviour and Marcella's unexpected gifts played
about equal parts.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the "Cedar garden," the most
adorable corner of Mellor Park, where the original Tudor house, grey,
mullioned and ivy-covered, ran at right angles into the later "garden
front," which projected beyond it to the south, making thereby a sunny
and sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowers
grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as though
conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty. The grass indeed
wanted mowing, and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it;
the flowers were untied and untrimmed. But under the condition of two
gardeners to ten acres of garden, nature does very much as she pleases,
and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain.

As for Marcella, she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness by
the ragged charm of the old place.

On the one hand, it angered her that anything so plainly meant for
beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt. On the other, if
house and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of the
neighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply,
shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,--in short, the general
self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,--where would have been
that thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely,
which the old place so constantly made upon her? It seemed to depend
even upon _her_, the latest born of all its children--to ask for
tendance and cherishing even from _her_. She was always planning
how--with a minimum of money to spend--it could be comforted and healed,
and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as though
she had been bred there.

But this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult and
depression of spirit. What _was_ this past which in these new
surroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again?