“Leave it to my discretion,” said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and looking up.  “Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you.  Mr. Wharton, in his letter this morning, mentioned that you had given him two introductions which were important to him.  She specially wished you to be thanked for it.”

His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was genuinely glad to hear.  In her opinion he was much too apt to forget that the world yields itself only to the “violent.”

He walked away from the house without once looking back.  Marcella, from, her window, watched him go.

“How could she see him?” she asked herself passionately, both then and on many other occasions during these rushing, ghastly days.  His turn would come, and it should be amply given him.  But now the very thought of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell’s library threw her into wild tears.  The time for entreaty—­for argument—­was gone by, so far as he was concerned.  He might have been her champion, and would not.  She threw herself recklessly, madly into the encouragement and support of the man who had taken up the task which, in her eyes, should have been her lover’s.  It had become to her a fight—­with society, with the law, with Aldous—­in which her whole nature was absorbed.  In the course of the fight she had realised Aldous’s strength, and it was a bitter offence to her.

How little she could do after all!  She gathered together all the newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line; she wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters; she attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been started at Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd and her children.  She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector, because they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with her father were much strained.  Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of alarm as to how things might end.  He might not like the Raeburns, but that anything should come in the way of his daughter’s match was, notwithstanding, the very last thing in the world, as he soon discovered, that he really desired.  During six months he had taken it for granted; so had the county.  He, of all men, could not afford to be made ridiculous, apart from the solid, the extraordinary advantages of the matter.  He thought Marcella a foolish, unreasonable girl, and was not the less in a panic because his wife let him understand that he had had a good deal to do with it.  So that between him and his daughter there were now constant sparrings—­sparrings which degraded Marcella in her own eyes, and contributed not a little to make her keep away from home.

The one place where she breathed freely, where the soul had full course, was in Minta Hurd’s kitchen.  Side by side with that piteous plaintive misery, her own fierceness dwindled.  She would sit with little Willie on her knees in the dusk of the spring evenings, looking into the fire, and crying silently.  She never suspected that her presence was often a burden and constraint, not only to the sulky sister-in-law but to the wife herself.  While Miss Boyce was there the village kept away; and Mrs. Hurd was sometimes athirst, without knowing it, for homelier speech and simpler consolations than any Marcella could give her.