“Oh!  I dare say he will make his stealing sound very pretty,” said Mary, with unwonted scorn, as she opened the front door for her friend.

Marcella flashed out.

“I know you are a saint, Mary,” she said, turning back on the path outside to deliver her last shaft.  “I am often not so sure whether you are a Christian!”

Then she hurried off without another word, leaving the flushed and shaken Mary to ponder this strange dictum.

* * * * *

Marcella was just turning into the straight drive which led past the church on the left to Mellor House, when she heard footsteps behind her, and, looking round, she saw Edward Hallin.

“Will you give me some lunch, Miss Boyce, in return for a message?  I am here instead of Aldous, who is very sorry for himself, and will be over later.  I am to tell you that he went down to the station to meet a certain box.  The box did not come, but will come this afternoon; so he waits for it, and will bring it over.”

Marcella flushed, smiled, and said she understood.  Hallin moved on beside her, evidently glad of the opportunity of a talk with her.

“We are all going together to the Gairsley meeting next week, aren’t we?  I am so glad you are coming.  Aldous will do his best.”

There was something very winning in his tone to her.  It implied both his old and peculiar friendship for Aldous, and his eager wish to find a new friend in her—­to adopt her into their comradeship.  Something very winning, too, in his whole personality—­in the loosely knit, nervous figure, the irregular charm of feature, the benignant eyes and brow—­even in the suggestions of physical delicacy, cheerfully concealed, yet none the less evident.  The whole balance of Marcella’s temper changed in some sort as she talked to him.  She found herself wanting to please, instead of wanting to conquer, to make an effect.

“You have just come from the village, I think?” said Hallin.  “Aldous tells me you take a great interest in the people?”

He looked at her kindly, the look of one who saw all his fellow-creatures nobly, as it were, and to their best advantage.

“One may take an interest,” she said, in a dissatisfied voice, poking at the snow crystals on the road before her with the thorn-stick she carried, “but one can do so little.  And I don’t know anything; not even what I want myself.”

“No; one can do next to nothing.  And systems and theories don’t matter, or, at least, very little.  Yet, when you and Aldous are together, there will be more chance of doing, for you than for most.  You will be two happy and powerful people!  His power will be doubled by happiness; I have always known that.”

Marcella was seized with shyness, looked away, and did not know what to answer.  At last she said abruptly—­her head still turned to the woods on her left—­

“Are you sure he is going to be happy?”