“No,” said Marcella, shortly.  “I have not asked papa, nor anybody.”

“It was only settled this morning.  Your father told me hurriedly as he went out.  You are to have two thousand a year of your own.”

The tone was dry, and the speaker’s look as she turned towards her daughter had in it a curious hostility; but Marcella did not notice her mother’s manner.

“It is too much,” she said in a low voice.

She had thrown back her head against the chair in which she sat, and her half-troubled eyes were wandering over the darkening expanse of lawn and avenue.

“He said he wished you to feel perfectly free to live your own life, and to follow out your own projects.  Oh, for a person of projects, my dear, it is not so much.  You will do well to husband it.  Keep it for yourself.  Get what you want out of it:  not what other people want.”

Again Marcella’s attention missed the note of agitation in her mother’s sharp manner.  A soft look—­a look of compunction—­passed across her face.  Mrs. Boyce began to put her working things away, finding it too dark to do any more.

“By the way,” said the mother, suddenly, “I suppose you will be going over to help him in his canvassing this next few weeks?  Your father says the election will be certainly in February.”

Marcella moved uneasily.

“He knows,” she said at last, “that I don’t agree with him in so many things.  He is so full of this Peasant Proprietors Bill.  And I hate peasant properties.  They are nothing but a step backwards.”

Mrs. Boyce lifted her eyebrows.

“That’s unlucky.  He tells me it is likely to be his chief work in the new Parliament.  Isn’t it, on the whole, probable that he knows more about the country than you do, Marcella?”

Marcella sat up with sudden energy and gathered her walking things together.

“It isn’t knowledge that’s the question, mamma; it’s the principle of the thing.  I mayn’t know anything, but the people whom I follow know.  There are the two sides of thought—­the two ways of looking at things.  I warned Aldous when he asked me to marry him which I belonged to.  And he accepted it.”

Mrs. Boyce’s thin fine mouth curled a little.

“So you suppose that Aldous had his wits about him on that great occasion as much as you had?”

Marcella first started, then quivered with nervous indignation.

“Mother,” she said, “I can’t bear it.  It’s not the first time that you have talked as though I had taken some unfair advantage—­made an unworthy bargain.  It is too hard too.  Other people may think what they like, but that you—­”

Her voice failed her, and the tears came into her eyes.  She was tired and over-excited, and the contrast between the atmosphere of flattery and consideration which surrounded her in Aldous’s company, in the village, or at the Winterbournes, and this tone which her mother so often took with her when they were alone, was at the moment hardly to be endured.