g of late, and her insight sharpening. During these recent weeks
of close contact, her mother's singularity had risen in her mind to the
dignity at least of a problem, an enigma.

Presently Mrs. Boyce rose and put the scones down by the fire.

"Your father will be in, I suppose. Yes, I hear the front door."

As she spoke she took off her velvet cloak, put it carefully aside on a
sofa, and sat down again, still in her bonnet, at the tea-table. Her
dress was very different from Marcella's, which, when they were not in
mourning, was in general of the ample "aesthetic" type, and gave her a
good deal of trouble out of doors. Marcella wore "art serges" and
velveteens; Mrs. Boyce attired herself in soft and costly silks,
generally black, closely and fashionably made, and completed by various
fanciful and distinguished trifles--rings, an old chatelaine, a diamond
brooch--which Marcella remembered, the same, and worn in the same way,
since her childhood. Mrs. Boyce, however, wore her clothes so daintily,
and took such scrupulous and ingenious care of them, that her dress
cost, in truth, extremely little--certainly less than Marcella's.

There were sounds first of footsteps in the hall, then of some scolding
of William, and finally Mr. Boyce entered, tired and splashed from
shooting, and evidently in a bad temper.

"Well, what are you going to do about those cards?" he asked his wife
abruptly when she had supplied him with tea, and he was beginning to dry
by the fire. He was feeling ill and reckless; too tired anyway to
trouble himself to keep up appearances with Marcella.

"Return them," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly, blowing out the flame of her
silver kettle.

"_I_ don't want any of their precious society," he said irritably. "They
should have done their calling long ago. There's no grace in it now; I
don't know that one isn't inclined to think it an intrusion."

But the women were silent. Marcella's attention was diverted from her
mother to the father's small dark head and thin face. There was a great
repulsion and impatience in her heart, an angry straining against
circumstance and fate; yet at the same time a mounting voice of natural
affection, an understanding at once sad and new, which paralysed and
silenced her. He stood in her way--terribly in her way--and yet it
strangely seemed to her, that never before till these last few weeks had
she felt herself a daughter.

"You are very wet, papa," she said to him as she too