to go to Italy--and naturally a fellow sees what
_that_ means--and what her mother's after. I don't believe Betty
_would_; he's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"--this time he
smote his knee in real desperation--"now I _have_ done it. I'm simply
_bursting_ always with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say.
Why they make 'em like me I don't know!"

"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience--"that her mother wants her
to marry Mr. Raeburn?"

He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair,
her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the
pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night
with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into
his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist
the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the
Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He
knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but
all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the
headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a
burning curiosity as to how she would take it--what she would say.

Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his
chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and
self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.

"I don't know why you talk like that," she said, looking at him
steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life without hearing Mr.
Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise so much! It really doesn't
matter what I suppose--that _you_ think--about my present state of mind.
It is very simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved
badly. I know it--and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living
one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for
you to come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about
Mr. Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."

Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.

"I never thought of that," he said.

"Well, you might, mightn't you?"

For another short space there was silence between them, while the rush
of talk in the centre of the room was still loud and unspent.

Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her shy
and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away.

"So you think Miss Raeb