me still more!"

And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of
expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.

"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics
is one thing--slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her
head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in
the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and
Wharton had scored his first point.

He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their
ways.

"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it
teases.' _We_ know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you
get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid
Radical in the House I'm always having rows with--and upon my word I
didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"

Marcella flushed.

"Never mind where I got it!" she said.

In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had
worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much
angry zest, and to such different purpose.

* * * * *

When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort
her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for
a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.

His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully."

"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a sigh of
exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into
sleeping trim. But you go, Alice--good-night."

When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the
thought--"She must contradict here as she contradicted there! _She_--and
justice! If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last
year--"

He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection,
oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep.
Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh
sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four
men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in
his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the
night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either
to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.

H