Marcella’s lip quivered.  She could not speak, apparently.  Waving her hand to her mother, she joined the maid waiting for her, and the two disappeared into the blackness.

“But does it do any good?” Mrs. Boyce repeated to herself as she went back to the drawing-room. “Sympathy! who was ever yet fed, warmed, comforted by sympathy?  Marcella robs that woman of the only thing that the human being should want at such a moment—­solitude.  Why should we force on the poor what to us would be an outrage?”

Meanwhile Marcella battled through the wind and rain, thankful that the warm spring burst was over, and that the skies no longer mocked this horror which was beneath them.

At the entrance to the village she stopped, and took the basket from the little maid.

“Now, Ruth, you can go home.  Run quick, it is so dark, Ruth!”

“Yes, miss.”

The young country girl trembled.  Miss Boyce’s tragic passion in this matter had to some extent infected the whole household in which she lived.

“Ruth, when you say your prayers to-night, pray God to comfort the poor,—­and to punish the cruel!”

“Yes, miss,” said the girl, timidly, and ready to cry.  The lantern she held flashed its light on Miss Boyce’s white face and tall form.  Till her mistress turned away she did not dare to move; that dark eye, so wide, full, and living, roused in her a kind of terror.

On the steps of the cottage Marcella paused.  She heard voices inside—­or rather the rector’s voice reading.

A thought of scorn rose in her heart.  “How long will the poor endure this religion—­this make-believe—­which preaches patience, patience! when it ought to be urging war?”

But she went in softly, so as not to interrupt.  The rector looked up and made a grave sign of the head as she entered; her own gesture forbade any other movement in the group; she took a stool beside Willie, whose makeshift bed of chairs and pillows stood on one side of the fire; and the reading went on.

Since Minta Hurd had returned with Marcella from Widrington Gaol that afternoon, she had been so ill that a doctor had been sent for.  He had bade them make up her bed downstairs in the warm; and accordingly a mattress had been laid on the settle, and she was now stretched upon it.  Her huddled form, the staring whiteness of the narrow face and closed eyelids, thrown out against the dark oak of the settle, and the disordered mass of grizzled hair, made the centre of the cottage.

Beside her on the floor sat Mary Harden, her head bowed over the rough hand she held, her eyes red with weeping.  Fronting them, beside a little table, which held a small paraffin lamp, sat the young rector, his Testament in his hand, his slight boy’s figure cast in sharp shadow on the cottage wall.  He had placed himself so as to screen the crude light of the lamp from the wife’s eyes; and an old skirt had been hung over a chair to keep it from little Willie.  Between mother and child sat Ann Mullins, rocking herself to and fro over the fire, and groaning from time to time—­a shapeless sullen creature, brutalised by many children and much poverty—­of whom Marcella was often impatient.