o you feel worse again? Why will you not change your things directly
you come in? Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?"

She was standing close beside him; her beautiful hand, for which in
their young days it had pleased his pride to give her rings, almost
touched him. A passionate hunger leapt within him. She would stoop and
kiss him if he asked her; he knew that. But he would not ask her; he did
not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give
him again.

Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.

"Clarke does me no good--not an atom," he said, rising. "There--don't
you come. I Can look after myself."

He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room. She
put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so
stood silent for long. There was no sound audible in the room, or from
the house outside. And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more
nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor
God.

* * * * *

"I shall go, for all our sakes," thought Marcella, as she stood late
that night brushing her hair before her dimly-lighted and rickety
dressing-table. "We have, it seems, no right to be proud."

A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart--pain, new-born and
insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself. Ever since Aldous
Raeburn's hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden
invasion of a hot and shamed misery. And to-night, after her talk with
her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.

But her strong personality, her passionate sense of a moral independence
not to be undone by the acts of another, even a father, made her soon
impatient of her own distress, and she flung it from her with decision.

"No, we have no right to be proud," she repeated to herself. "It must be
all true what Mr. Raeburn said--probably a great deal more. Poor, poor
mamma! But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty
quarrelling and standing alone. And it was so long ago."

Her hand fell, and she stood absently looking at her own black and white
reflection in the old flawed glass.

She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn. He had been very prompt in
her service. There could be no question but that he was specially
interested in her.

And he was not a man to be lightly played upon--nay, rather a singularly
reserved and scrupulous person. So, at least, it had