“I will leave you at the gate,” he suggested as they walked briskly; “and you will ask your father, will you not, if I may see him to-night after dinner?”

The trees thinned again in front of them, and the path curved inward to the front.  Suddenly a man, walking on the road, diverged into the path and came towards them.  He was swinging a stick and humming.  His head was uncovered, and his light chestnut curls were blown about his forehead by the wind.  Marcella, looking up at the sound of the steps, had a sudden impression of something young and radiant, and Aldous stopped with an exclamation.

The new-comer perceived them, and at sight of Aldous smiled, and approached, holding out his hand.

“Why, Raeburn, I seem to have missed you twenty times a day this last fortnight.  We have been always on each other’s tracks without meeting.  Yet I think, if we had met, we could have kept our tempers.”

“Miss Boyce, I think you do not know Mr. Wharton,” said Aldous, stiffly.  “May I introduce you?”

The young man’s blue eyes, all alert and curious at the mention of Marcella’s name, ran over the girl’s face and form.  Then he bowed with a certain charming exaggeration—­like an eighteenth-century beau with his hand upon his heart—­and turned back with them a step or two towards the road.

BOOK II.

“A woman has enough to govern wisely
Her own demeanours, passions and divisions.”

CHAPTER I.

On a certain night in the December following the engagement of Marcella Boyce to Aldous Raeburn, the woods and fields of Mellor, and all the bare rampart of chalk down which divides the Buckinghamshire plain from the forest upland of the Chilterns lay steeped in moonlight, and in the silence which belongs to intense frost.

Winter had set in before the leaf had fallen from the last oaks; already there had been a fortnight or more of severe cold, with hardly any snow.  The pastures were delicately white; the ditches and the wet furrows in the ploughed land, the ponds on Mellor common, and the stagnant pool in the midst of the village, whence it drew its main water supply, were frozen hard.  But the ploughed chalk land itself lay a dull grey beside the glitter of the pastures, and the woods under the bright sun of the days dropped their rime only to pass once more with the deadly cold of the night under the fantastic empire of the frost.  Every day the veil of morning mist rose lightly from the woods, uncurtaining the wintry spectacle, and melting into the brilliant azure of an unflecked sky; every night the moon rose without a breath of wind, without a cloud; and all the branch-work of the trees, where they stood in the open fields, lay reflected clean and sharp on the whitened ground.  The bitter cold stole into the cottages, marking the old and feeble with the touch of Azrael; while without, in the field solitudes, bird and beast cowered benumbed and starving in hole and roosting place.