Meanwhile new destinies were preparing for her.  For a variety of small reasons Mr. Boyce, who had never yet troubled himself about the matter from a distance, was not, upon personal inspection, very favourably struck with his daughter’s surroundings.  His wife remarked shortly, when he complained to her, that Marcella seemed to her as well off as the daughter of persons of their means could expect to be.  But Mr. Boyce stuck to his point.  He had just learnt that Harold, the only son of his widowed brother Robert, of Mellor Park, had recently developed a deadly disease, which might be long, but must in the end be sure.  If the young man died and he outlived Robert, Mellor Park would be his; they would and must return, in spite of certain obstacles, to their natural rank in society, and Marcella must of course be produced as his daughter and heiress.  When his wife repulsed him, he went to his eldest sister, an old maid with a small income of her own, who happened to be staying with them, and was the only member of his family with whom he was now on terms.  She was struck with his remarks, which bore on family pride, a commodity not always to be reckoned on in the Boyces, but which she herself possessed in abundance; and when he paused she slowly said that if an ideal school of another type could be found for Marcella, she would be responsible for what it might cost over and above the present arrangement.  Marcella’s manners were certainly rough; it was difficult to say what she was learning, or with whom she was associating; accomplishments she appeared to have none.  Something should certainly be done for her—­considering the family contingencies.  But being a strong evangelical, the aunt stipulated for “religious influences,” and said she would write to a friend.

The result was that a month or two later Marcella, now close on her fourteenth birthday, was transferred from Cliff House to the charge of a lady who managed a small but much-sought-after school for young ladies at Solesby, a watering place on the east coast.

* * * * *

But when in the course of reminiscence Marcella found herself once more at Solesby, memory began to halt and wander, to choose another tone and method.  At Solesby the rough surroundings and primitive teaching of Cliff House, together with her own burning sense of inferiority and disadvantage, had troubled her no more.  She was well taught there, and developed quickly from the troublesome child into the young lady duly broken in to all social proprieties.  But it was not her lessons or her dancing masters that she remembered.  She had made for herself agitations at Cliff House, but what were they as compared to the agitations of Solesby!  Life there had been one long Wertherish romance in which there were few incidents, only feelings, which were themselves events.  It contained humiliations and pleasures, but they had been all matters of spiritual relation, connected