The portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where her music-books survived,—­a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand; but the Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her own physique and her father’s were to be traced to its original, as well, no doubt, as the artistic aptitudes of both—­aptitudes not hitherto conspicuous in her respectable race.

In reality, however, she loved every one of them—­these Jacobean and Georgian squires with their interminable epitaphs.  Now, as she stood in the church, looking about her, her flowers lying beside her in a tumbled heap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitable pride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one great lifting wave.  The depression of her father’s repentances and trepidations fell away; she felt herself in her place, under the shelter of her forefathers, incorporated and redeemed, as it were, into their guild of honour.

There were difficulties in her path, no doubt—­but she had her vantage-ground, and would use it for her own profit and that of others. She had no cause for shame; and in these days of the developed individual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice and wrong.  Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last two years had brought her of her natural power over men and things.  She knew perfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her age could never venture—­that she had fascination, resource, brain.

Already, in these few weeks—­Smiles played about her lips as she thought of that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at the Hardens’.  His grandfather might write what he pleased.  It did not alter the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly one of the partis most coveted, and one of the men most observed, in the neighbourhood, had taken and shown a very marked interest in Mr. Boyce’s daughter—­all the more marked because of the reserved manner with which it had to contend.

No! whatever happened, she would carve her path, make her own way, and her parents’ too.  At twenty-one, nothing looks irrevocable.  A woman’s charm, a woman’s energy should do it all.

Ay, and something else too.  She looked quickly round the church, her mind swelling with the sense of the Cravens’ injustice and distrust.  Never could she be more conscious than here—­on this very spot—­of mission, of an urging call to the service of man.  In front of her was the Boyces’ family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretched bench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat when it came to church.  Here, for the first time, had Marcella been brought face to face with the agricultural world as it is—­no stage ruralism, but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects.  Men of sixty and upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had worked their lives; not old