“Nothing!  He cares just as much about the poor as you or I, please understand!  He doesn’t choose my way—­but he won’t interfere with it.”

“Ah! that is like him—­like Aldous.”

Marcella started.

“You don’t mind my calling him by his Christian name sometimes?  It drops out.  We used to meet as boys together at the Levens.  The Levens are my cousins.  He was a big boy, and I was a little one.  But he didn’t like me.  You see—­I was a little beast!”

His air of appealing candour could not have been more engaging.

“Yes, I fear I was a little beast.  And he was, even then, and always, ‘the good and beautiful.’  You don’t understand Greek, do you, Miss Boyce?  But he was very good to me.  I got into an awful scrape once.  I let out a pair of eagle owls that used to be kept in the courtyard—­Sir Charles loved them a great deal more than his babies—­I let them out at night for pure wickedness, and they came to fearful ends in the park.  I was to have been sent home next day, in the most unnecessary and penal hurry.  But Aldous interposed—­said he would look after me for the rest of the holidays.”

“And then you tormented him?”

“Oh no!” he said with gentle complacency.  “Oh no!  I never torment anybody.  But one must enjoy oneself you know; what else can one do?  Then afterwards, when we were older—­somehow I don’t know—­but we didn’t get on.  It is very sad—­I wish he thought better of me.”

The last words were said with a certain change of tone, and sitting up he laid the tips of his fingers together on his knees with a little plaintive air.  Marcella’s eyes danced with amusement, but she looked away from him to the fire, and would not answer.

“You don’t help me out.  You don’t console me.  It’s unkind of-you.  Don’t you think it a melancholy fate to be always admiring the people who detest you?”

“Don’t admire them!” she said merrily.

His eyebrows lifted. “That,” he said drily, “is disloyal.  I call—­I call your ancestor over the mantelpiece”—­he waved his hand towards a blackened portrait in front of him—­“to witness, that I am all for admiring Mr. Raeburn, and you discourage it.  Well, but now—­now”—­he drew his chair eagerly towards hers, the pose of a minute before thrown to the winds—­“do let us understand each other a little more before people come.  You know I have a labour newspaper?”

She nodded.

“You read it?”

“Is it the Labour Clarion?  I take it in.”

“Capital!” he cried.  “Then I know now why I found a copy in the village here.  You lent it to a man called Hurd?”

“I did.”

“Whose wife worships you?—­whose good angel you have been?  Do I know something about you, or do I not?  Well, now, are you satisfied with that paper?  Can you suggest to me means of improving it?  It wants some fresh blood, I think—­I must find it?  I bought the thing last year, in a moribund condition, with the old staff.  Oh! we will certainly take counsel together about it—­most certainly!  But first—­I have been boasting of knowing something about you—­but I should like to ask—­do you know anything about me?”