ast bell ringing, and with the dignified
ancestral sound which was still so novel and attractive to Marcella's
ear. Recalled to Mellor Park and its circumstances, she went
thoughtfully downstairs, pondering a little on the shallow steps of the
beautiful Jacobean staircase. _Could_ she ever turn her back upon those
holidays? Was she not rather, so to speak, just embarked upon their
sequel, or second volume?

But let us go downstairs also.

CHAPTER III.

Breakfast was laid in the "Chinese room," a room which formed part of
the stately "garden front," added to the original structure of the house
in the eighteenth century by a Boyce whose wife had money. The
decorations, especially of the domed and vaulted roof, were supposed by
their eighteenth century designer to be "Oriental"; they were, at any
rate, intricate and overladen; and the figures of mandarins on the worn
and discoloured wall-paper had, at least, top-knots, pigtails, and
petticoats to distinguish them from the ordinary Englishmen of 1760,
besides a charming mellowness of colour and general effect bestowed on
them by time and dilapidation. The marble mantelpiece was elaborately
carved in Chinamen and pagodas. There were Chinese curiosities of a
miscellaneous kind on the tables, and the beautiful remains of an Indian
carpet underfoot. Unluckily, some later Boyce had thrust a crudely
Gothic sideboard, with an arched and pillared front, adapted to the
purposes of a warming apparatus, into the midst of the mandarins, which
disturbed the general effect. But with all its original absurdities, and
its modern defacements, the room was a beautiful and stately one.
Marcella stepped into it with a slight unconscious straightening of her
tall form. It seemed to her that she had never breathed easily till
now, in the ample space of these rooms and gardens.

Her father and mother were already at table, together with Mrs. Boyce's
brown spaniel Lynn.

Mr. Boyce was employed in ordering about the tall boy in a worn and
greasy livery coat, who represented the men-service of the
establishment; his wife was talking to her dog, but from the lift of her
eyebrows, and the twitching of her thin lips, it was plain to Marcella
that her mother was as usual of opinion that her father was behaving
foolishly.

"There, for goodness' sake, cut some bread on the sideboard," said the
angry master, "and hand it round instead of staring about you like a
stuck pig. What they taught