“One moment!” said Raeburn, smiling, “and I will take you in pursuit.  She has only gone into the tea-room.”

His hand touched Marcella’s.

“Just a little better,” he said, with a sudden change of look, in answer to Lady Winterbourne’s question.  “The account to-night is certainly brighter.  They begged me not to come, or I should have been off some days ago.  And next week, I am thankful to say, they will be home.”

Why should she be standing there, so inhumanly still and silent?—­Marcella asked herself.  Why not take courage again—­join in—­talk—­show sympathy?  But the words died on her lips.  After to-night—­thank heaven!—­she need hardly see him again.

He asked after herself as usual.  Then, just as he was turning away with Betty, he came back to her, unexpectedly.

“I should like to tell you about Hallin,” he said gently.  “His sister writes to me that she is happier about him, and that she hopes to be able to keep him away another fortnight.  They are at Keswick.”

For an instant there was pleasure in the implication of common ground, a common interest—­here if no-where else.  Then the pleasure was lost in the smart of her own strange lack of self-government as she made a rather stupid and awkward reply.

Raeburn’s eyes rested on her for a moment.  There was in them a flash of involuntary expression, which she did not notice—­for she had turned away—­which no one saw—­except Betty.  Then the child followed him to the tea-room, a little pale and pensive.

Marcella looked after them.

In the midst of the uproar about her, the babel of talk fighting against the Hungarian band, which was playing its wildest and loudest in the tea-room, she was overcome by a sudden rush of memory.  Her eyes were tracing the passage of those two figures through the crowd; the man in his black court suit, stooping his refined and grizzled head to the girl beside him, or turning every now and then to greet an acquaintance, with the manner—­cordial and pleasant, yet never quite gay even when he smiled—­that she, Marcella, had begun to notice of late as a new thing; the girl lifting her small face to him, the gold of her hair showing against his velvet sleeve.  But the inward sense was busy with a number of other impressions, past, and, as it now seemed, incredible.

The little scene when Aldous had given her the pearls, returned so long ago—­why! she could see the fire blazing in the Stone Parlour, feel his arm about her!—­the drive home after the Gairsley meeting—­that poignant moment in his sitting-room the night of the ball—­his face, his anxious, tender face, as she came down the wide stairs of the Court towards him on that terrible evening when she pleaded with him and his grandfather in vain:—­had these things, incidents, relations, been ever a real part of the living world?  Impossible!  Why, there he was—­not ten yards from her—­and yet more irrevocably separate from her than if the Sahara stretched between them.  The note of cold distance in his courteous manner put her further from him than the merest stranger.