As for Willie, he was fast dwindling.  Another week or two—­the doctor said—­no more.  He lay on Marcella’s knee on a pillow, wasted to an infant’s weight, panting and staring with those strange blue eyes, but always patient, always struggling to say his painful “thank you” when she fed him with some of the fruit constantly sent her from Maxwell Court.  Everything that was said about his father he took in and understood, but he did not seem to fret.  His mother was almost divided from him by this passivity of the dying; nor could she give him or his state much attention.  Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature was strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.

After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd’s kitchen Marcella found the air of the February evening tonic and delightful.  Unconsciously impressions stole upon her—­the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens.  They spoke to her youth, and out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond.  Still, her face kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison.  More than that—­the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved upon it the signs of “living.”  It was more beautiful than ever in its significant black and white, but it was older—­a woman spoke from it.  Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion and the storm for which such souls as hers are made.  Rebellion most of all.  She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease; she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of soul and spirit, which made the physical destitution seem to the spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature—­or God?  She would hardly let herself think of Aldous—­though she must think of him by-and-by!  He and his fared sumptuously every hour!  As for her, it was as though in her woman’s arms, on her woman’s breast, she carried Lazarus all day, stooping to him with a hungering pity.  And Aldous stood aloof.  Aldous would not help her—­or not with any help worth having—­in consoling this misery—­binding up these sores.  Her heart cried shame on him.  She had a crime against him to confess—­but she felt herself his superior none the less.  If he cast her off—­why then surely they would be quits, quits for good and all.

As she reached the front door of Mellor, she saw a little two-wheeled cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony.

Visitors were nowadays more common at Mellor than they had been, and her instinct was to escape.  But as she was turning to a side door William touched his cap to her.

“Mr. Wharton’s waiting to see you, miss.”

She stopped sharply.

“Where is Mrs. Boyce, William?”

“In the drawing-room, miss.”