“Shall I produce his letter to me?” he said, bantering—­“or letters?  For I knew a great deal about you before October 5” (their engagement-day), “and suspected what was going to happen long before Aldous did.  No; after all, no!  Those letters are my last bit of the old friendship.  But the new began that same day,” he hastened to add, smiling:  “It may be richer than the old; I don’t know.  It depends on you.”

“I don’t think—­I am a very satisfactory friend,” said Marcella, still awkward, and speaking with difficulty.

“Well, let me find out, won’t you?  I don’t think Aldous would call me exacting.  I believe he would give me a decent character, though I tease him a good deal.  You must let me tell you sometime what he did for me—­what he was to me—­at Cambridge?  I shall always feel sorry for Aldous’s wife that she did not know him at college.”

A shock went through Marcella at the word—­that tremendous word—­wife.  As Hallin said it, there was something intolerable in the claim it made!

“I should like you to tell me,” she said faintly.  Then she added, with more energy and a sudden advance of friendliness, “But you really must come in and rest.  Aldous told me he thought the walk from the Court was too much for you.  Shall we take this short way?”

And she opened a little gate leading to a door at the side of the house through the Cedar Garden.  The narrow path only admitted of single file, and Hallin followed her, admiring her tall youth and the fine black and white of her head and cheek as she turned every now and then to speak to him.  He realised more vividly than before the rare, exciting elements of her beauty, and the truth in Aldous’s comparison of her to one of the tall women in a Florentine fresco.  But he felt himself a good deal baffled by her, all the same.  In some ways, so far as any man who is not the lover can understand such things, he understood why Aldous had fallen in love with her; in others, she bore no relation whatever to the woman his thoughts had been shaping all these years as his friend’s fit and natural wife.

Luncheon passed as easily as any meal could be expected to do, of which Mr. Boyce was partial president.  During the preceding month or two he had definitely assumed the character of an invalid, although to inexperienced eyes like Marcella’s there did not seem to be very much the matter.  But, whatever the facts might be, Mr. Boyce’s adroit use of them had made a great difference to his position in his own household.  His wife’s sarcastic freedom of manner was less apparent; and he was obviously less in awe of her.  Meanwhile he was as sore as ever towards the Raeburns, and no more inclined to take any particular pleasure in Marcella’s prospects, or to make himself agreeable towards his future son-in-law.  He and Mrs. Boyce had been formally asked in Miss Raeburn’s best hand to the Court ball, but he had at once snappishly announced his intention of staying at home.  Marcella sometimes looked back with astonishment to his eagerness for social notice when they first came to Mellor.  Clearly the rising irritability of illness had made it doubly unpleasant to him to owe all that he was likely to get on that score to his own daughter; and, moreover, he had learnt to occupy himself more continuously on his own land and with his own affairs.