He stood in front of the fire, looking round the great room, and at the few small lamps making their scanty light amid the flame-lit darkness.  His hands were loosely crossed behind his back, and his boyish face, in its setting of curls, shone with content and self-possession.

“Well,” said Marcella, bluntly, “I should prefer a little more light to live by.  Perhaps, when you have fallen downstairs here in the dark as often as I have, you may too.”

He laughed.

“But how much better, after all—­don’t you think so?—­to have too little of anything than too much!”

He flung himself into a chair beside the tea-table, looking up with gay interrogation as Marcella handed him his cup.  She was a good deal surprised by him.  On the few occasions of their previous meetings, these bright eyes, and this pronounced manner, had been—­at any rate as towards herself—­much less free and evident.  She began to recover the start he had given her, and to study him with a half-unwilling curiosity.

“Then Mellor will please you,” she said drily, in answer to his remark, carrying her own tea meanwhile to a chair on the other side of the fire.  “My father never bought anything—­my father can’t.  I believe we have chairs enough to sit down upon—­but we have no curtains to half the windows.  Can I give you anything?”

For he had risen, and was looking over the tea-tray.

“Oh! but I must,” he said discontentedly.  “I must have enough sugar in my tea!”

“I gave you more than the average,” she said, with a sudden little leap of laughter, as she came to his aid.  “Do all your principles break down like this?  I was going to suggest that you might like some of that fire taken away?” And she pointed to the pile of blazing logs which now filled up the great chimney.

“That fire!” he said, shivering, and moving up to it.  “Have you any idea what sort of a wind you keep up here on these hills on a night like this?  And to think that in this weather, with a barometer that laughs in your face when you try to move it, I have three meetings to-morrow night!”

“When one loves the ‘People,’ with a large P,” said Marcella, “one mustn’t mind winds.”

He flashed a smile at her, answering to the sparkle of her look, then applied himself to his tea and toasted bun again, with the dainty deliberation of one enjoying every sip and bite.

“No; but if only the People didn’t live so far apart.  Some murderous person wanted them to have only one neck.  I want them to have only one ear.  Only then unfortunately everybody would speak well—­which would bring things round to dulness again.  Does Mr. Raeburn make you think very bad things of me, Miss Boyce?”

He bent forward to her as he spoke, his blue eyes all candour and mirth.

Marcella started.

“How can he?” she said abruptly.  “I am not a Conservative.”

“Not a Conservative?” he said joyously.  “Oh! but impossible!  Does that mean that you ever read my poor little speeches?”