As to the state of the village, neither Marcella’s entreaties nor reproaches had any effect upon him.  When it appeared certain that he would be summoned for some specially flagrant piece of neglect he would spend a few shillings on repairs; otherwise not a farthing.  All that filial softening towards him of which Marcella had been conscious in the early autumn had died away in her.  She said to herself now plainly and bitterly that it was a misfortune to belong to him; and she would have pitied her mother most heartily if her mother had ever allowed her the smallest expression of such a feeling.  As it was, she was left to wonder and chafe at her mother’s new-born mildness.

In the drawing-room, after luncheon, Hallin came up to Marcella in a corner, and, smiling, drew from his pocket a folded sheet of foolscap.

“I made Aldous give me his speech to show you, before to-morrow night,” he said.  “He would hardly let me take it, said it was stupid, and that you would not agree with it.  But I wanted you to see how he does these things.  He speaks now, on an average, two or three times a week.  Each time, even for an audience of a score or two of village folk, he writes out what he has to say.  Then he speaks it entirely without notes.  In this way, though he has not much natural gift, he is making himself gradually an effective and practical speaker.  The danger with him, of course, is lest he should be over-subtle and over-critical—­not simple and popular enough.”

Marcella took the paper half unwillingly and glanced over it in silence.

“You are sorry he is a Tory, is that it?” he said to her, but in a lower voice, and sitting down beside her.

Mrs. Boyce, just catching the words from where she sat with her work, at the further side of the room, looked up with a double wonder—­wonder at Marcella’s folly, wonder still more at the deference with which men like Aldous Raeburn and Hallin treated her.  It was inevitable, of course—­youth and beauty rule the world.  But the mother, under no spell herself, and of keen, cool wit, resented the intellectual confusion, the lowering of standards involved.

“I suppose so,” said Marcella, stupidly, in answer to Hallin’s question, fidgeting the papers under her hand.  Then his curious confessor’s gift, his quiet questioning look with its sensitive human interest to all before him, told upon her.

“I am sorry he does not look further ahead, to the great changes that must come,” she added hurriedly.  “This is all about details, palliatives.  I want him to be more impatient.”

“Great political changes you mean?”

She nodded; then added—­

“But only for the sake, of course, of great social changes to come after.”

He pondered a moment.

“Aldous has never believed in great changes coming suddenly.  He constantly looks upon me as rash in the things I adopt and believe in.  But for the contriving, unceasing effort of every day to make that part of the social machine in which a man finds himself work better and more equitably, I have never seen Aldous’s equal—­for the steady passion, the persistence, of it.”