rd for Jim, was responsible for it, out
of pity for her and her children. The payment offered her by Miss Boyce
would defray the expense of London house-rent, the children's schooling,
and leave a trifle over. Moreover she was pining to get away from
Mellor. Her first instinct after her husband's execution had been to
hide herself from all the world. But for a long time her precarious
state of health, and her dependence first on Marcella, then on Mary
Harden, made it impossible for her to leave the village. It was not till
Marcella's proposal came that her way was clear. She sold her bits of
things at once, took her children and went up to Brown's buildings.

Marcella met her with the tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from
which the peasant's wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often
shrunk from it in the past. Jim's fate had made her an old woman at
thirty-two. She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with
almost white hair, and a face from which youth had gone, unless perhaps
there were some traces of it in the still charming eyes, and small open
mouth. But these changes had come upon her she knew not why, as the
result of blows she felt but had never reasoned about. Marcella's fixed
mode of conceiving her and her story caused her from the beginning of
their fresh acquaintance a dumb irritation and trouble she could never
have explained. It was so tragic, reflective, exacting. It seemed to ask
of her feelings that she could not have, to expect from her expression
that was impossible. And it stood also between her and the friends and
distractions that she would like to have. Why shouldn't that queer man,
Mr. Strozzi, who lived down below, and whose name she could not
pronounce, come and sit sometimes of an evening, and amuse her and the
children? He was a "Professor of Elocution," and said and sung comic
pieces. He was very civil and obliging too; she liked him. Yet Miss
Boyce was evidently astonished that she could make friends with him, and
Minta perfectly understood the lift of her dark eyebrows whenever she
came in and found him sitting there.

Meanwhile Marcella had expected her with emotion, and had meant through
this experiment to bring herself truly near to the poor. Minta must not
call her Miss Boyce, but by her name; which, however, Minta, reddening,
had declared she could never do. Her relation to Marcella was not to be
that of servant in any sense, but of friend and sister; and on he