But this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult and depression of spirit.  What was this past which in these new surroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again?  She energetically decided that the time had come for her to demand the truth.  Yet, of whom?  Marcella knew very well that to force her mother to any line of action Mrs. Boyce was unwilling to follow, was beyond her power.  And it was not easy to go to her father directly and say, “Tell me exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back upon you.”  All the same, it was due to them all, due to herself especially, now that she was grown up and at home, that she should not be kept in the dark any longer like a baby, that she should be put in possession of the facts which, after all, threatened to stand here at Mellor Park, as untowardly in their, in her way, as they had done in the shabby school and lodging-house existence of all those bygone years.

Perhaps the secret of her impatience was that she did not, and could not, believe that the facts, if faced, would turn out to be insurmountable.  Her instinct told her as she looked back that their relation toward society in the past, though full of discomforts and humiliations, had not been the relation of outcasts.  Their poverty and the shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them the disrespect of one class; and as to the acquaintances and friends of their own rank, what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cool distaste for their company, an insulting readiness to forget the existence of people who had so to speak lost their social bloom, and laid themselves open to the contemptuous disapproval or pity of the world.  Everybody, it seemed, knew their affairs, and knowing them saw no personal advantage and distinction in the Boyces’ acquaintance, but rather the contrary.

As she put the facts together a little, she realised, however, that the breach had always been deepest between her father and his relations, or his oldest friends.  A little shiver passed through her as she reflected that here, in his own country, where his history was best known, the feeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably be strongest.  Well, it was hard upon them!—­hard upon her mother—­hard upon her.  In her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and the dignities of her new position, how little she had thought of these things!  And there they were all the time—­dogging and thwarting.

She walked slowly along, with her burden of flowers, through a laurel path which led straight to the drive, and so, across it, to the little church.  The church stood all alone there under the great limes of the Park, far away from parsonage and village—­the property, it seemed, of the big house.  When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south sides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had been already at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit of necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.