d of
Horace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whatever
doors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper classes of the
leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly
acquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome an
Italian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her home
to Mellor, where straightway the garden front was built with all its
fantastic and beautiful decoration, the great avenue was planted,
pictures began to invade the house, and a musical library was collected
whereof the innumerable faded volumes, bearing each of them the entwined
names of Richard and Marcella Boyce, had been during the last few weeks
mines of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of to-day.

The Italian wife bore her lord two sons, and then in early middle life
she died--much loved and passionately mourned. Her tomb bore no
long-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace--for
she was Italian to the last, and her husband loved her the better for
it--the dates of her birth and death, and then two lines from Dante's
_Vita Nuova_.

The portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where her
music-books survived,--a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand; but
the Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her own
physique and her father's were to be traced to its original, as well, no
doubt, as the artistic aptitudes of both--aptitudes not hitherto
conspicuous in her respectable race.

In reality, however, she loved every one of them--these Jacobean and
Georgian squires with their interminable epitaphs. Now, as she stood in
the church, looking about her, her flowers lying beside her in a tumbled
heap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitable
pride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one great
lifting wave. The depression of her father's repentances and
trepidations fell away; she felt herself in her place, under the shelter
of her forefathers, incorporated and redeemed, as it were, into their
guild of honour.

There were difficulties in her path, no doubt--but she had her
vantage-ground, and would use it for her own profit and that of others.
_She_ had no cause for shame; and in these days of the developed
individual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice and
wrong. Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last two
years had brought her of her natural