High up on the distant hill to the left, beyond the avenue, the pale apricots and golds of the newly-shorn stubbles caught the mounting light.  The beeches of the avenue were turning fast, and the chestnuts girdling the church on her right hand were already thin enough to let the tower show through.  That was the bell—­the old bell given to the church by Hampden’s friend, John Boyce—­striking half-past five; and close upon it came the call of a pheasant in the avenue.  There he was, fine fellow, with his silly, mincing run, redeemed all at once by the sudden whirr of towering flight.

To-day Mary Harden and the Rector would be at work in the church, and to-morrow was to be the Harvest Festival.  Was it two years?—­or in an hour or two would she be going with her basket from the Cedar Garden, to find that figure in the brown shooting-coat standing with the Hardens on the altar steps?

Alas!—­alas!—­her head dropped on her hands as she knelt by the open window.  How changed were all the aspects of the world!  Three weeks before, the bell in that little church had tolled for one who, in the best way and temper of his own generation, had been God’s servant and man’s friend—­who had been Marcella’s friend—­and had even, in his last days, on a word from Edward Hallin, sent her an old man’s kindly farewell.

“Tell her,” Lord Maxwell had written with his own hand to Hallin, “she has taken up a noble work, and will make, I pray God, a noble woman.  She had, I think, a kindly liking for an old man, and she will not disdain his blessing.”

He had died at Geneva, Aldous and Miss Raeburn with him.  For instead of coming home in August, he had grown suddenly worse, and Aldous had gone out to him.  They had brought him to the Court for burial, and the new Lord Maxwell, leaving his aunt at the Court, had almost immediately returned to town,—­because of Edward Hallin’s state of health.

Marcella had seen much of Hallin since he and his sister had come back to London in the middle of August.  Hallin’s apparent improvement had faded within a week or two of his return to his rooms; Aldous was at Geneva; Miss Hallin was in a panic of alarm; and Marcella found herself both nurse and friend.  Day after day she would go in after her nursing rounds, share their evening meal, and either write for Hallin, or help the sister—­by the slight extra weight of her professional voice—­to keep him from writing and thinking.

He would not himself admit that he was ill at all, and his whole energies at the time were devoted to the preparation of a series of three addresses on the subject of Land Reform, which were to be delivered in October to the delegates of a large number of working-men’s clubs from all parts of London.  So strong was Hallin’s position among working-men reformers, and so beloved had been his personality, that as soon as his position towards the new land nationalising movement, now gathering formidable strength among the London working men, had come to be widely understood, a combined challenge had been sent him by some half-dozen of the leading Socialist and Radical clubs, asking him to give three weekly addresses in October to a congress of London delegates, time to be allowed after the lecture for questions and debate.