stand that very few people will see it
from your point of view. Aldous Raeburn may--you must know best. But his
people certainly won't; and your father will think it--"

"Madness," she was going to say, but with her usual instinct for the
moderate fastidious word she corrected it to "foolish."

Marcella's tired eyes were all wilfulness and defiance.

"I can't help it. I couldn't do it. I will tell Aldous at once. It must
be put off for a month. And even that," she added with a shudder, "will
be bad enough."

Mrs. Boyce could not help an unperceived shrug of the shoulders, and a
movement of pity towards the future husband. Then she said drily,--

"You must always consider whether it is just to Mr. Raeburn to let a
matter of this kind interfere so considerably with his wishes and his
plans. He must, I suppose, be in London for Parliament within six
weeks."

Marcella did not answer. She sat with her hands round her knees lost in
perplexities. The wedding, as originally fixed, was now three weeks and
three days off. After it, she and Aldous were to have spent a short
fortnight's honeymoon at a famous house in the north, lent them for the
occasion by a Duke who was a cousin of Aldous's on the mother's side,
and had more houses than he knew what to do with. Then they were to go
immediately up to London for the opening of Parliament. The furnishing
of the Mayfair house was being pressed on. In her new-born impatience
with such things, Marcella had hardly of late concerned herself with it
at all, and Miss Raeburn, scandalised, yet not unwilling, had been doing
the whole of it, subject to conscientious worryings of the bride,
whenever she could be got hold of, on the subject of papers and
curtains.

As they sat silent, the unspoken idea in the mother's mind was--"Eight
weeks more will carry us past the execution." Mrs. Boyce had already
possessed herself very clearly of the facts of the case, and it was her
perception that Marcella was throwing herself headlong into a hopeless
struggle--together with something else--a confession perhaps of a touch
of greatness in the girl's temper, passionate and violent as it was,
that had led to this unwonted softness of manner, this absence of
sarcasm.

Very much the same thought--only treated as a nameless horror not to be
recognised or admitted--was in Marcella's mind also, joined however with
another, unsuspected even by Mrs. Boyce's acuteness. "Very likely--when
I tell him--he w