erfused with all--determining all--elements of
judgment, subtleties, prejudices, modes of looking at things, for which
he was hardly responsible, so deeply ingrained were they by inheritance
and custom. More than this: did not the ultimate explanation of the
whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a
strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed
it? The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and
distorted; none the less, _reality_ wins the day. So Hallin read it.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a
bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with,
and spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings,
committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either
man to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything
outside the clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of
intense and monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a
tiny cottage, hanging over sick-beds, and thrilling to each pulse of
anguish as it beat in the miserable beings she tended.

The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and
jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks--till after
Easter--without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in
village and county. And when the reason was known--that it was because
Miss Boyce had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that
until the whole affair was over, and the men either executed or
reprieved, she could spare no thought to wedding clothes or cates--there
was curiously little sympathy with Marcella. Most of her own class
thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss
Raeburn--something done for self-advertisement and to advance
anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive
English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the
bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.

"She can't be very fond o' 'im, not of Muster Raeburn, she can't," said
old Patton, delivering himself as he sat leaning on his stick at his
open door, while his wife and another woman or two chattered inside.
"_Not_ what I'd call lover-y. She don't want to run in harness, she
don't, no sooner than, she need. She's a peert filly is Miss Boyce."

"I've been a-waitin', an' a-waitin'," said his wife,