The colour leapt to Marcella’s cheek as she tied on her hat.

“You will set up another keeper, and you won’t do anything for the village?” she cried, her black eyes lightening, and without another word she opened the French window and walked rapidly away along the terrace, leaving her father both angered and amazed.

A man like Richard Boyce cannot get comfortably through life without a good deal of masquerading in which those in his immediate neighbourhood are expected to join.  His wife had long since consented to play the game, on condition of making it plain the whole time that she was no dupe.  As to what Marcella’s part in the affair might be going to be, her father was as yet uneasily in the dark.  What constantly astonished him, as she moved and talked under his eye, was the girl’s beauty.  Surely she had been a plain child, though a striking one.  But now she had not only beauty, but the air of beauty.  The self-confidence given by the possession of good looks was very evident in her behaviour.  She was very accomplished, too, and more clever than was always quite agreeable to a father whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him by misfortune.  Such a girl was sure to be admired.  She would have lovers—­friends of her own.  It seemed that already, while Lord Maxwell was preparing to insult the father, his grandson had discovered that the daughter was handsome.  Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie, wherein the Raeburns’ behaviour and Marcella’s unexpected gifts played about equal parts.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the “Cedar garden,” the most adorable corner of Mellor Park, where the original Tudor house, grey, mullioned and ivy-covered, ran at right angles into the later “garden front,” which projected beyond it to the south, making thereby a sunny and sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowers grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as though conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty.  The grass indeed wanted mowing, and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it; the flowers were untied and untrimmed.  But under the condition of two gardeners to ten acres of garden, nature does very much as she pleases, and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain.

As for Marcella, she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness by the ragged charm of the old place.

On the one hand, it angered her that anything so plainly meant for beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt.  On the other, if house and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of the neighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply, shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,—­in short, the general self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,—­where would have been that thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely, which the old place so constantly made upon her?  It seemed to depend even upon her, the latest born of all its children—­to ask for tendance and cherishing even from her.  She was always planning how—­with a minimum of money to spend—­it could be comforted and healed, and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as though she had been bred there.