“So the Socialists are the only people who think?” said Mrs. Boyce, who was now standing by the window, pressing her dog’s head against her dress as he pushed up against her.  “Well, I am sorry for the Hardens.  They tell me they give all their substance away—­already—­and every one says it is going to be a particularly bad winter.  The living, I hear, is worth nothing.  All the same, I should wish them to look more cheerful.  It is the first duty of martyrs.”

Marcella looked at her mother indignantly.  It seemed to her often that she said the most heartless things imaginable.

“Cheerful!” she said—­“in a village like this—­with all the young men drifting off to London, and all the well-to-do people dissenters—­no one to stand by him—­no money and no helpers—­the people always ill—­wages eleven and twelve shillings a week—­and only the old wrecks of men left to do the work!  He might, I think, expect the people in this house to back him up a little.  All he asks is that papa should go and satisfy himself with his own eyes as to the difference between our property and Lord Maxwell’s—­”

“Lord Maxwell’s!” cried Mr. Boyce, rousing himself from a state of half-melancholy, half-sleepy reverie by the fire, and throwing away his cigarette—­“Lord Maxwell!  Difference!  I should think so.  Thirty thousand a year, if he has a penny.  By the way, I wish he would just have the civility to answer my note about those coverts over by Willow Scrubs!”

He had hardly said the words when the door opened to admit William the footman, in his usual tremor of nervousness, carrying a salver and a note.

“The man says, please sir, is there any answer, sir?”

“Well, that’s odd!” said Mr. Boyce, his look brightening.  “Here is Lord Maxwell’s answer, just as I was talking of it.”

His wife turned sharply and watched him take it; her lips parted, a strange expectancy in her whole attitude.  He tore it open, read it, and then threw it angrily under the grate.

“No answer.  Shut the door.”  The lad retreated.  Mr. Boyce sat down and began carefully to put the fire together.  His thin left hand shook upon his knee.

There was a moment’s pause of complete silence.  Mrs. Boyce’s face might have been seen by a close observer to quiver and then stiffen as she stood in the light of the window, a tall and queenly figure in her sweeping black.  But she said not a word, and presently left the room.

Marcella watched her father.

“Papa—­was that a note from Lord Maxwell?”

Mr. Boyce looked round with a start, as though surprised that any one was still there.  It struck Marcella that he looked yellow and shrunken—­years older than her mother.  An impulse of tenderness, joined with anger and a sudden sick depression—­she was conscious of them all as she got up and went across to him, determined to speak out.  Her parents were not her friends, and did not possess her confidence;