t never quite gay even when he
smiled--that she, Marcella, had begun to notice of late as a new thing;
the girl lifting her small face to him, the gold of her hair showing
against his velvet sleeve. But the inward sense was busy with a number
of other impressions, past, and, as it now seemed, incredible.

The little scene when Aldous had given her the pearls, returned so long
ago--why! she could see the fire blazing in the Stone Parlour, feel his
arm about her!--the drive home after the Gairsley meeting--that poignant
moment in his sitting-room the night of the ball--his face, his anxious,
tender face, as she came down the wide stairs of the Court towards him
on that terrible evening when she pleaded with him and his grandfather
in vain:--had these things, incidents, relations, been ever a real part
of the living world? Impossible! Why, there he was--not ten yards from
her--and yet more irrevocably separate from her than if the Sahara
stretched between them. The note of cold distance in his courteous
manner put her further from him than the merest stranger.

Marcella felt a sudden terror rush through her as she blindly followed
Lady Winterbourne; her limbs trembled under her; she took advantage of a
conversation between her companion and the master of the house to sink
down for a moment on a settee, where she felt out of sight and notice.

What was this intolerable sense of loss and folly, this smarting
emptiness, this rage with herself and her life? She only knew that
whereas the touch, the eye of Aldous Raeburn had neither compelled nor
thrilled her, so long as she possessed his whole heart and
life--_now_--that she had no right to either look or caress; now that he
had ceased even to regard her as a friend, and was already perhaps
making up that loyal and serious mind of his to ask from another woman
the happiness she had denied him; now, when it was absurdly too late,
she could--

Could what? Passionate, wilful creature that she was!--with that breath
of something wild and incalculable surging through the inmost places of
the soul, she went through a moment of suffering as she sat pale and
erect in her corner--brushed against by silks and satins, chattered
across by this person and that--such as seemed to bruise all the
remaining joy and ease out of life.

But only a moment! Flesh and blood rebelled. She sprang up from her
seat; told herself that she was mad or ill; caught sight of Mr. Lane
coming towards them,