For some fourteen hours, therefore, on these days of durance Marcella was left almost wholly alone, nothing but a wild mass of black hair and a pair of roving, defiant eyes in a pale face showing above the bedclothes whenever the housemaid chose to visit her—­a pitiable morsel, in truth, of rather forlorn humanity.  For though she had her movements of fierce revolt, when she was within an ace of throwing the senna-tea in Martha’s face, and rushing downstairs in her nightgown to denounce Miss Frederick in the midst of an astonished schoolroom, something generally interposed; not conscience, it is to be feared, or any wish “to be good,” but only an aching, inmost sense of childish loneliness and helplessness; a perception that she had indeed tried everybody’s patience to the limit, and that these days in bed represented crises which must be borne with even by such a rebel as Marcie Boyce.

So she submitted, and presently learnt, under dire stress of boredom, to amuse herself a good deal by developing a natural capacity for dreaming awake.  Hour by hour she followed out an endless story of which she was always the heroine.  Before the annoyance of her afternoon gruel, which she loathed, was well forgotten, she was in full fairy-land again, figuring generally as the trusted friend and companion of the Princess of Wales—­of that beautiful Alexandra, the top and model of English society whose portrait in the window of the little stationer’s shop at Marswell—­the small country town near Cliff House—­had attracted the child’s attention once, on a dreary walk, and had ever since governed her dreams.  Marcella had no fairy-tales, but she spun a whole cycle for herself around the lovely Princess who came to seem to her before long her own particular property.  She had only to shut her eyes and she had caught her idol’s attention—­either by some look or act of passionate yet unobtrusive homage as she passed the royal carriage in the street—­or by throwing herself in front of the divinity’s runaway horses—­or by a series of social steps easily devised by an imaginative child, well aware, in spite of appearances, that she was of an old family and had aristocratic relations.  Then, when the Princess had held out a gracious hand and smiled, all was delight!  Marcella grew up on the instant:  she was beautiful, of course; she had, so people said, the “Boyce eyes and hair;” she had sweeping gowns, generally of white muslin with cherry-coloured ribbons; she went here and there with the Princess, laughing and talking quite calmly with the greatest people in the land, her romantic friendship with the adored of England making her all the time the observed of all observers, bringing her a thousand delicate flatteries and attentions.