ng at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him.
Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head
in the sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to
anybody. Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that,
notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them.

"I don't suppose you know much about your cousin!" she said to him with
a little scorn.

"Well, I don't want to!" said the lad, "that's one comfort! But I don't
know anything about anything!--Miss Boyce!"

He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at
once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside
her.

Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several
times his confidante. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of
his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. To-night she
recognised the old symptoms.

"What, you have been getting into scrapes again?" she said--"how many
since we met last?"

"There! you make fun of it!" he said indignantly from behind his
fingers--"you're like all the rest."

Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a
flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.

"If you're only going to chaff a fellow let's go over there and talk!
And yet I did want to tell you about it--you were awfully kind to me
down at home. I want to tell you--and I don't want to tell you--perhaps
I _oughtn't_ to tell you--you'll think me a brute, I dare say, an
ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all--and yet somehow--"

The boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a
hand on his arm. She had been used to these motherly ways with him at
Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by
its two years or so of time!

"I won't laugh," she said, "tell me."

"No--really?--shall I?"

Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar it seemed to
some half dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A
pretty girl--or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some
relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again
at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and
adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking
her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not
to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed
like