“Hold your tongue, sir, and listen to me.  I think your Marcella is beautiful, and as interesting as she is beautiful.  There!”

Aldous started, then turned a grateful face upon him.

“You must get to know her well,” he said, but with some constraint.

“Of course.  I wonder,” said Hallin, musing, “whom she has got hold of among the Venturists.  Shall you persuade her to come out of that, do you think, Aldous?”

“No!” said Raeburn, cheerfully.  “Her sympathies and convictions go with them.”

Then, as they passed through the village, he began to talk of quite other things—­college friends, a recent volume of philosophical essays, and so on.  Hallin, accustomed and jealously accustomed as he was to be the one person in the world with whom Raeburn talked freely, would not to-night have done or said anything to force a strong man’s reserve.  But his own mind was full of anxiety.

CHAPTER IV.

“I love this dilapidation!” said Wharton, pausing for a moment with his back against the door he had just shut.  “Only it makes me long to take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other—­plastering, or carpentering, or painting.  What useless drones we upper classes are!  Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor—­to save our lives.”

They were in the disused library.  It was now the last room westwards of the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to her English husband’s birthplace.  The roof had been raised and domed to match the “Chinese room,” at the expense of some small rooms on the upper floor; and the windows and doors had been suited to eighteenth-century taste.  But the old books in the old latticed shelves which the Puritan founder of the family had bought in the days of the Long Parliament were still there; so were the chairs in which that worthy had sat to read a tract of Milton’s or of Baxter’s, or the table at which he had penned his letters to Hampden or Fairfax, or to his old friend—­on the wrong side—­Edmund Verney the standard-bearer.  Only the worm-eaten shelves were dropping from their supports, and the books lay in mouldy confusion; the roofs had great holes and gaps, whence the laths hung dismally down, and bats came flitting in the dusk; and there were rotten places in the carpetless floor.

“I have tried my best,” said Marcella, dolefully, stooping to look at a hole in the floor.  “I got a bit of board and some nails, and tried to mend some of these places myself.  But I only broke the rotten wood away; and papa was angry, and said I did more harm than good.  I did get a carpenter to mend some of the chairs; but one doesn’t know where to begin.  I have cleaned and mended some of the books, but—­”