He put her hand inside his arm, and they pushed their way through the crowd.  Outside in the passage they met Hallin.  He had not seen her before, and he put out his hand.  But there was something distant in his gentle greeting which struck at this moment like a bruise on Marcella’s quivering nerves.  It came across her that for some time past he had made no further advances to her; that his first eager talk of friendship between himself and her had dropped; that his acceptance of her into his world and Aldous’s was somehow suspended—­in abeyance.  She bit her lip tightly and hurried Aldous along.  Again the same lines of gay, chatting people along the corridor, and on either side of the wide staircase—­greetings, introduction—­a nightmare of publicity.

“Rather pronounced—­to carry him off like that,” said a clergyman to his wife with a kindly smile, as the two tall figures disappeared along the upper gallery.  “She will have him all to herself before long.”

* * * * *

Aldous shut the door of his sitting-room behind them.  Marcella quickly drew her hand out of his arm, and going forward to the mantelpiece rested both elbows upon it and hid her face.

He looked at her a moment in distress and astonishment, standing a little apart.  Then he saw that she was crying.  The colour flooded into his face, and going up to her he took her hand, which was all she would yield him, and, holding it to his lips, said in her ear every soothing tender word that love’s tutoring could bring to mind.  In his emotion he told himself and her that he admired and loved her the more for the incident downstairs, for the temper she had shown!  She alone among them all had had the courage to strike the true stern Christian note.  As to the annoyance such courage might bring upon him and her in the future—­even as to the trouble it might cause his own dear folk—­what real matter?  In these things she should lead.

What could love have asked better than such a moment?  Yet Marcella’s weeping was in truth the weeping of despair.  This man’s very sweetness to her, his very assumption of the right to comfort and approve her, roused in her a desperate stifled sense of bonds that should never have been made, and that now could not be broken.  It was all plain to her at last.  His touch had no thrill for her; his frown no terror.  She had accepted him without loving him, coveting what he could give her.  And now it seemed to her that she cared nothing for anything he could give!—­that the life before her was to be one series of petty conflicts between her and a surrounding circumstance which must inevitably in the end be too strong for her, conflicts from which neither heart nor ambition could gain anything.  She had desired a great position for what she might do with it.  But could she do with it!  She would be subdued—­oh! very quickly!—­to great houses and great people, and all the vapid pomp