“Oh, I say! don’t go.  Do come and sit here with me a bit.  Oh, isn’t it rum! isn’t it rum!  Look at Hallin,—­those are the people whom he cares to talk to.  That’s a shoemaker, that man to the left—­really an awfully cute fellow—­and this man in front, I think he told me he was a mason, a Socialist of course—­would like to string me up to-morrow.  Did you ever see such a countenance?  Whenever that man begins, I think we must be precious near to shooting.  And he’s pious too, would pray over us first and shoot us afterwards—­which isn’t the case, I understand, with many of ’em.  Then the others—­you know them?  That’s Bennett—­regular good fellow—­always telling his pals not to make fools of themselves—­for which of course they love him no more than they are obliged—­And Wilkins—­oh! Wilkins”—­he chuckled—­“they say it’ll come to a beautiful row in the House before they’ve done, between him and my charming cousin, Harry Wharton.  My father says he backs Wilkins.”

Then suddenly the lad recollected himself and his clear cheek coloured a little after a hasty glance at his companion.  He fell to silence and looking at his boots.  Marcella wondered what was the matter with him.  Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head in the sand.  She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to anybody.  Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that, notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them.

“I don’t suppose you know much about your cousin!” she said to him with a little scorn.

“Well, I don’t want to!” said the lad, “that’s one comfort!  But I don’t know anything about anything!—­Miss Boyce!”

He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside her.

Her black eyes danced with laughter.  At Mellor she had been several times his confidante.  The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning.  To-night she recognised the old symptoms.

“What, you have been getting into scrapes again?” she said—­“how many since we met last?”

“There! you make fun of it!” he said indignantly from behind his fingers—­“you’re like all the rest.”

Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.

“If you’re only going to chaff a fellow let’s go over there and talk!  And yet I did want to tell you about it—­you were awfully kind to me down at home.  I want to tell you—­and I don’t want to tell you—­perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you—­you’ll think me a brute, I dare say, an ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all—­and yet somehow—­”

The boy, crimson, bit his lips.  Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a hand on his arm.  She had been used to these motherly ways with him at Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by its two years or so of time!