Marcella paused a frowning moment, then broke suddenly into a delightful laugh—­a laugh of humorous confession, which changed her whole look and mood.

“Is that all you have noticed?  If you wish to know, Mr. Raeburn, I love the labourers for touching their hats to me.  I love the school children for bobbing to me.  I love my very self—­ridiculous as you may think it—­for being Miss Boyce of Mellor!”

“Don’t say things like that, please!” he interrupted; “I think I have not deserved them.”

His tone made her repent her gibe.  “No, indeed, you have been most kind to me,” she cried.  “I don’t know how it is.  I am bitter and personal in a moment—­when I don’t mean to be.  Yes! you are quite right.  I am proud of it all.  If nobody comes to see us, and we are left all alone out in the cold, I shall still have room enough to be proud in—­proud of the old house and our few bits of pictures, and the family papers, and the beeches!  How absurd it would seem to other people, who have so much more!  But I have had so little—­so little!” Her voice had a hungry lingering note.  “And as for the people, yes, I am proud too that they like me, and that already I can influence them.  Oh, I will do my best for them, my very best!  But it will be hard, very hard, if there is no one to help me!”

She heaved a long sigh.  In spite of the words, what she had said did not seem to be an appeal for his pity.  Rather there was in it a sweet self-dedicating note as of one going sadly alone to a painful task, a note which once more left Aldous Raeburn’s self-restraint tottering.  She was walking gently beside him, her pretty dress trailing lightly over the dry stubble, her hand in its white ruffles hanging so close beside him—­after all her prophetess airs a pensive womanly thing, that must surely hear how his strong man’s heart was beginning to beat!

He bent over to her.

“Don’t talk of there being no one to help!  There may be many ways out of present difficulties.  Meanwhile, however things go, could you be large-minded enough to count one person here your friend?”

She looked up at him.  Tall as she was, he was taller—­she liked that; she liked too the quiet cautious strength of his English expression and bearing.  She did not think him handsome, and she was conscious of no thrill.  But inwardly her quick dramatising imagination was already constructing her own future and his.  The ambition to rule leapt in her, and the delight in conquest.  It was with a delicious sense of her own power, and of the general fulness of her new life, that she said, “I am large-minded enough!  You have been very kind, and I have been very wild and indiscreet.  But I don’t regret:  I am sure, if you can help me, you will.”

There was a little pause.  They were standing at the last gate before the miry village road began, and almost in sight of the little vicarage.  Aldous Raeburn, with his hand on the gate, suddenly gathered a spray of travellers’-joy out of the hedge beside him.