At that very moment Marcella caught sight of Edith strolling along towards her with a couple of members, and chatting as though the world had never rolled more evenly.

“Oh! there she is—­there is my friend!” cried Marcella to Lady Winterbourne.  “Good-night—­good-night!”

She was hurrying off when she saw Aldous Raeburn was standing alone a moment.  The exasperated Betty had made a dart from his side to “collect” another straying member of the party.

An impulse she could not master scattered her wretched discomfort—­even her chafing sense of being the observed of many eyes.  She walked up to him.

“Will you tell me about Lord Maxwell?” she said in a tremulous hurry.  “I am so sorry he is ill—­I hadn’t heard—­I—­”

She dared not look up.  Was that his voice answering?

“Thank you.  We have been very anxious about him; but the doctors to-day give a rather better report.  We take him abroad to-morrow.”

“Marcella! at last!” cried Edith Craven, catching hold of her friend; “you lost me?  Oh, nonsense; it was all the other way.  But look, there is Mr. Wharton coming out.  I must go—­come and say good-night—­everybody is departing.”

Aldous Raeburn lifted his hat.  Marcella felt a sudden rush of humiliation—­pain—­sore resentment.  That cold, strange tone—­those unwilling words!—­She had gone up to him—­as undisciplined in her repentance as she had been in aggression—­full of a passionate yearning to make friends—­somehow to convey to him that she “was sorry,” in the old child’s phrase which her self-willed childhood had used so little.  There could be no misunderstanding possible!  He of all men knew best how irrevocable it all was.  But why, when life has brought reflection, and you realise at last that you have vitally hurt, perhaps maimed, another human being, should it not be possible to fling conventions aside, and go to that human being with the frank confession which by all the promises of ethics and religion ought to bring peace—­peace and a soothed conscience?

But she had been repulsed—­put aside, so she took it—­and by one of the kindest and most generous of men!  She moved along the terrace in a maze, seeing nothing, biting her lip to keep back the angry tears.  All that obscure need, that new stirring of moral life within her—­which had found issue in this little futile advance towards a man who had once loved her and could now, it seemed, only despise and dislike, her—­was beating and swelling stormlike within her.  She had taken being loved so easily, so much as a matter of course!  How was it that it hurt her now so much to have lost love, and power, and consideration?  She had never felt any passion for Aldous Raeburn—­had taken him lightly and shaken him off with a minimum of remorse.  Yet to-night a few cold words from him—­the proud manner of a moment—­had inflicted a smart upon her she could hardly bear.  They had made her feel herself so alone, unhappy, uncared for!