whenever her father’s illness, of which she now understood the incurable though probably tedious nature, should reach a certain stage, she must go home and take up her life there again.  Why embitter such a situation?—­make it more difficult for everybody concerned?  Why not simply bury the past and begin again?  In her restlessness she was inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he.

Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him with all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his private life and his public career.  Their circle, too, was his circle; and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House.  The result was a number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else.  The promise of Raeburn’s political position struck her quick mind with a curious surprise.  She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained his place in Brookshire—­by the mere accidents of birth.  After all, aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men by any other criterion than personal profitableness.  And a man nowadays is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by what he has—­so far at least has “progress” brought us.

She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of “consideration,” using the word in its French sense, among his political contemporaries.  He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried; while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public.  Marcella, indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and various sources—­mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work of England.  Above all things did she love and admire power—­the power of personal capacity.  It had been the secret, it was still half the secret, of Wharton’s influence with her.  She saw it here under wholly different conditions and accessories.  She gave it recognition with a kind of unwillingness.  All the same, Raeburn took a new place in her imagination.

Then—­apart from the political world and its judgments—­the intimacy between him and the Winterbourne family showed her to him in many new aspects.  To Lady Winterbourne, his mother’s dear and close friend, he was almost a son; and nothing could be more charming than the affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little oddities and weaknesses.  And to all her children he was bound by the memories and kindnesses of many years.