a painful task, a
note which once more left Aldous Raeburn's self-restraint tottering. She
was walking gently beside him, her pretty dress trailing lightly over
the dry stubble, her hand in its white ruffles hanging so close beside
him--after all her prophetess airs a pensive womanly thing, that must
surely hear how his strong man's heart was beginning to beat!

He bent over to her.

"Don't talk of there being no one to help! There may be many ways out of
present difficulties. Meanwhile, however things go, could you be
large-minded enough to count one person here your friend?"

She looked up at him. Tall as she was, he was taller--she liked that;
she liked too the quiet cautious strength of his English expression and
bearing. She did not think him handsome, and she was conscious of no
thrill. But inwardly her quick dramatising imagination was already
constructing her own future and his. The ambition to rule leapt in her,
and the delight in conquest. It was with a delicious sense of her own
power, and of the general fulness of her new life, that she said, "I
_am_ large-minded enough! You have been very kind, and I have been very
wild and indiscreet. But I don't regret: I am sure, if you can help me,
you will."

There was a little pause. They were standing at the last gate before
the miry village road began, and almost in sight of the little vicarage.
Aldous Raeburn, with his hand on the gate, suddenly gathered a spray of
travellers'-joy out of the hedge beside him.

"That was a promise, I think, and I keep the pledge of it," he said, and
with a smile put the cluster of white seed-tufts and green leaves into
one of the pockets of his shooting jacket.

"Oh, don't tie me down!" said Marcella, laughing, but flushing also.
"And don't you think, Mr. Raeburn, that you might open that gate? At
least, we can't get the scissors and the wire unless you do."

CHAPTER V.

The autumn evening was far advanced when Aldous Raeburn, after his day's
shooting, passed again by the gates of Mellor Park on his road home. He
glanced up the ill-kept drive, with its fine overhanging limes, caught a
glimpse to the left of the little church, and to the right, of the long
eastern front of the house; lingered a moment to watch the sunset light
streaming through the level branches of two distant cedars, standing
black and sharp against the fiery west, and then walked briskly forwards
in the mood of a man going as fast as may be to an