but her constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimes the result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger might have had.  She had no habitual deference to break through, and the hindering restraints of memory, though strong, were still less strong than they would have been if she had lived with them day by day and year by year, and had known their lives in close detail instead of guessing at them, as was now so often the case with her.

“Papa, is Lord Maxwell’s note an uncivil one?”

Mr. Boyce stooped forward and began to rub his chilly hand over the blaze.

“Why, that man’s only son and I used to loaf and shoot and play cricket together from morning till night when we were boys.  Henry Raeburn was a bit older than I, and he lent me the gun with which I shot my first rabbit.  It was in one of the fields over by Soleyhurst, just where the two estates join.  After that we were always companions—­we used to go out at night with the keepers after poachers; we spent hours in the snow watching for wood-pigeons; we shot that pair of kestrels over the inner hall door, in the Windmill Hill fields—­at least I did—­I was a better shot than he by that time.  He didn’t like Robert—­he always wanted me.”

“Well, papa, but what does he say?” asked Marcella, impatiently.  She laid her hand, however, as she spoke, on her father’s shoulder.

Mr. Boyce winced and looked up at her.  He and her mother had originally sent their daughter away from home that they might avoid the daily worry of her awakening curiosities, and one of his resolutions in coming to Mellor Park had been to keep up his dignity with her.  But the sight of her dark face bent upon him, softened by a quick and womanly compassion, seemed to set free a new impulse in him.

“He writes in the third person, if you want to know, my dear, and refers me to his agent, very much as though I were some London grocer who had just bought the place.  Oh, it is quite evident what he means.  They were here without moving all through June and July, and it is now three weeks at least since he and Miss Raeburn came back from Scotland, and not a card nor a word from either of them!  Nor from the Winterbournes, nor the Levens.  Pleasant!  Well, my dear, you must make up your mind to it.  I did think—­I was fool enough to think—­that when I came back to the old place, my father’s old friends would let bygones be bygones.  I never did them any harm.  Let them ‘gang their gait,’ confound them!”—­the little dark man straightened himself fiercely—­“I can get my pleasure out of the land; and as for your mother, she’d not lift a finger to propitiate one of them!”

In the last words, however, there was not a fraction of that sympathetic pride which the ear expected, but rather fresh bitterness and grievance.

Marcella stood thinking, her mind travelling hither and thither with lightning speed, now over the social events of the last six weeks—­now over incidents of those long-past holidays.  Was this, indeed, the second volume beginning—­the natural sequel to those old mysterious histories of shrinking, disillusion, and repulse?