lmost imploringly. "I could not
bear that she should suppose--"

Mrs. Boyce thought to herself indignantly that she never could have
imagined such a man in such a plight.

"I must go," he said, rising. "Will you tell her from me," he added
slowly, "that I could never have believed she would be so unkind as to
let me come down from London to see her, and send me away empty--without
a word?"

"Leave it to my discretion," said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and looking up.
"Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you. Mr. Wharton, in his letter
this morning, mentioned that you had given him two introductions which
were important to him. She specially wished you to be thanked for it."

His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was
genuinely glad to hear. In her opinion he was much too apt to forget
that the world yields itself only to the "violent."

He walked away from the house without once looking back. Marcella, from,
her window, watched him go.

"How _could_ she see him?" she asked herself passionately, both then
and on many other occasions during these rushing, ghastly days. His turn
would come, and it should be amply given him. But _now_ the very thought
of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell's library threw her into wild tears.
The time for entreaty--for argument--was gone by, so far as he was
concerned. He might have been her champion, and would not. She threw
herself recklessly, madly into the encouragement and support of the man
who had taken up the task which, in her eyes, should have been her
lover's. It had become to her a _fight_--with society, with the law,
with Aldous--in which her whole nature was absorbed. In the course of
the fight she had realised Aldous's strength, and it was a bitter
offence to her.

How little she could do after all! She gathered together all the
newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line;
she wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters;
she attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been
started at Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd
and her children. She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector,
because they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with
her father were much strained. Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of
alarm as to how things might end. He might not like the Raeburns, but
that anything should come in the way of his daughter's match was,