nsidered to
be a racking cough. But Miss Frederick was deaf to the latter, and only
threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and senna-tea for the former,
whereupon Marcella in alarm declared that her cold was much better and
gave up the cough in despair. It was her first sorrow and cost her some
days of pale brooding and silence, and some nights of stifled tears,
when during an Easter holiday a letter from Miss Frederick to her mother
announced the sudden death of Mary Lant.

CHAPTER II.

Friendship and love are humanising things, and by her fourteenth year
Marcella was no longer a clever little imp, but a fast-maturing and in
some ways remarkable girl, with much of the woman in her already. She
had begun even to feel an interest in her dress, to speculate
occasionally on her appearance. At the fourth breaking-up party after
her arrival at Cliff House, Marcella, who had usually figured on these
occasions in a linsey-woolsey high to the throat, amid the frilled and
sashed splendours of her companions, found lying on her bed, when she
went up with the others to dress, a plain white muslin dress with blue
ribbons. It was the gift of old Mademoiselle Renier, who affectionately
wished her queer, neglected favourite to look well. Marcella examined it
and fingered it with an excited mixture of feelings. First of all there
was the sore and swelling bitterness that she should owe such things to
the kindness of the French governess, whereas finery for the occasion
had been freely sent to all the other girls from "home." She very nearly
turned her back upon the bed and its pretty burden. But then the mere
snowy whiteness of the muslin and freshness of the ribbons, and the
burning curiosity to see herself decked therein, overcame a nature
which, in the midst of its penury, had been always really possessed by
a more than common hunger for sensuous beauty and seemliness. Marcella
wore it, was stormily happy in it, and kissed Mademoiselle Renier for it
at night with an effusion, nay, some tears, which no one at Cliff House
had ever witnessed in her before except with the accompaniments of rage
and fury.

A little later her father came to see her, the first and only visit he
paid to her at school. Marcella, to whom he was by now almost a
stranger, received him demurely, making no confidences, and took him
over the house and gardens. When he was about to leave her a sudden
upswell of paternal sentiment made him ask her if she