The lad coloured hotly, then bethought himself--radiant:--

"I left Eton last half, as of course you know quite well. But if it had
only been last Christmas instead of this, wouldn't I have scored--by
Jove! They gave us a beastly _essay_ instead of a book. _Demagogues_!' I
sat up all night, and screwed out a page and a half. I'd have known
something about it _now_."

And as he stood beside the tea-table, waiting for Marcella to entrust
some tea to him for distribution, he turned and made a profound bow to
his candidate cousin.

Everybody joined in the laugh, led by Wharton. Then there was a general
drawing up of chairs, and Marcella applied herself to making tea, helped
by Aldous. Wharton alone remained standing before the fire, observant
and apart.

Hallin, whose health at this moment made all exertion, even a drive,
something of a burden, sat a little away from the tea-table, resting,
and glad to be silent. Yet all the time he was observing the girl
presiding and the man beside her--his friend, her lover. The moment had
a peculiar, perhaps a melancholy interest for him. So close had been the
bond between himself and Aldous, that the lover's communication of his
engagement had evoked in the friend that sense--poignant,
inevitable--which in the realm of the affections always waits on
something done and finished,--a leaf turned, a chapter closed. "That sad
word, Joy!" Hallin was alone and ill when Raeburn's letter reached him,
and through the following day and night he was haunted by Landor's
phrase, long familiar and significant to him. His letter to his friend,
and the letter to Miss Boyce for which Raeburn had asked him, had cost
him an invalid's contribution of sleep and ease. The girl's answer had
seemed to him constrained and young, though touched here and there with
a certain fineness and largeness of phrase, which, if it was to be taken
as an index of character, no doubt threw light upon the matter so far as
Aldous was concerned.

Her beauty, of which he had heard much, now that he was face to face
with it, was certainly striking enough--all the more because of its
immaturity, the subtlety and uncertainty of its promise.
_Immaturity_--_uncertainty_--these words returned upon him as he
observed her manner with its occasional awkwardness, the awkwardness
which goes with power not yet fully explored or mastered by its
possessor. How Aldous hung upon her, following every movement,
anticipating every want! Af