She looked up.  His pale face had taken to itself glow and fire; his eyes were full of strenuous, nay, severe expression.  Her foolish pride rebelled a little.

“Of course, I haven’t seen much of that yet,” she said slowly.

His look for a moment was indignant, incredulous, then melted into a charming eagerness.

“But you will! naturally you will!—­see everything.  I hug myself sometimes now for pure pleasure that some one besides his grandfather and I will know what Aldous is and does.  Oh! the people on the estate know; his neighbours are beginning to know; and now that he is going into Parliament, the country will know some day, if work and high intelligence have the power I believe.  But I am impatient!  In the first place—­I may say it to you, Miss Boyce!—­I want Aldous to come out of that manner of his to strangers, which is the only bit of the true Tory in him; you can get rid of it, no one else can—­How long shall I give you?—­And in the next, I want the world not to be wasting itself on baser stuff when it might be praising Aldous!”

“Does he mean Mr. Wharton?” thought Marcella, quickly.  “But this world—­our world—­hates him and runs him down.”

But she had no time to answer, for the door opened to admit Aldous, flushed and bright-eyed, looking round the room immediately for her, and bearing a parcel in his left hand.

“Does she love him at all?” thought Hallin, with a nervous stiffening of all his lithe frame, as he walked away to talk to Mrs. Boyce, “or, in spite of all her fine talk, is she just marrying him for his money and position!”

Meanwhile, Aldous had drawn Marcella into the Stone Parlour and was standing by the fire with his arm covetously round her.

“I have lost two hours with you I might have had, just because a tiresome man missed his train.  Make up for it by liking these pretty things a little, for my sake and my mother’s.”

He opened the jeweller’s case, took out the fine old pearls—­necklace and bracelets—­it contained, and put them into her hand.  They were his first considerable gift to her, and had been chosen for association’s sake, seeing that his mother had also worn them before her marriage.

She flushed first of all with a natural pleasure, the girl delighting in her gaud.  Then she allowed herself to be kissed, which was, indeed, inevitable.  Finally she turned them over and over in her hands; and he began to be puzzled by her.

“They are much too good for me.  I don’t know whether you ought to give me such precious things.  I am dreadfully careless and forgetful.  Mamma always says so.”

“I shall want you to wear them so often that you won’t have a chance of forgetting them,” he said gaily.