And again they paused by the river, the girl glancing nervously behind her as though she were in a company of ghosts.  Lady Winterbourne recovered herself, and Marcella, looking at her, saw the old tragic severity of feature and mien blurred with the same softness, the same delicate tremor.  Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter’s feeling.  She took up the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet, and kissed it in the dark so that no one saw.

“I am glad to see you again,” she said passionately, “so glad!”

Lady Winterbourne was surprised and moved.

“But you have never written all these months, you unkind child!  And I have heard so little of you—­your mother never seemed to know.  When will you come and see me—­or shall I come to you?  I can’t stay now, for we were just going; my daughter, Ermyntrude Welwyn, has to take some one to a ball.  How strange”—­she broke off—­“how very strange that you and he should have met to-night!  He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with Lord Maxwell.”

“Yes, I had heard,” said Marcella, more steadily.  “Will you come to tea with me next week?—­Oh, I will write.—­And we must go too—­where can my friend be?”

She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith.

“I will take you back to the Lanes, anyway,” said Lady Winterbourne; “or shall we look after you?”

“No! no!  Take me back to the Lanes.”

“Mamma, are you coming?” said a voice like a softened version of Lady Winterbourne’s.  Then something small and thin ran forward, and a girl’s voice said piteously: 

“Dear Lady Winterbourne, my frock and my hair take so long to do! I shall be cross with my maid, and look like a fiend.  Ermyntrude will be sorry she ever knew me. Do come!”

“Don’t cry, Betty.  I certainly shan’t take you if you do!” said Lady Ermyntrude, laughing.  “Mamma, is this Miss Boyce—­your Miss Boyce?”

She and Marcella shook hands, and they talked a little, Lady Ermyntrude under cover of the darkness looking hard and curiously at the tall stranger whom, as it happened, she had never seen before.  Marcella had little notion of what she was saying.  She was far more conscious of the girlish form hanging on Lady Winterbourne’s arm than she was of her own words, of “Betty’s” beautiful soft eyes—­also shyly and gravely fixed upon herself—­under that marvellous cloud of fair hair; the long, pointed chin; the whimsical little face.

“Well, none of you are any good!” said Betty at last, in a tragic voice.  “I shall have to walk home my own poor little self, and ’ask a p’leeceman.’  Mr. Raeburn!”

He disengaged himself from a group behind and came—­with no alacrity.  Betty ran up to him.

“Mr. Raeburn!  Ermyntrude and Lady Winterbourne are going to sleep here, if you don’t mind making arrangements.  But I want a hansom.”