When his daughter entered, he turned his head, and his eyes, deep and black still as ever, but sunk in a yellow relic of a face, showed a certain agitation.  She was disagreeably aware that his thoughts were much occupied with her; that he was full of grievance towards her, and would probably before long bring the pathos of his situation as well as the weight of his dying authority to bear upon her, for purposes she already suspected with alarm.

“Are you a little easier, papa?” she said, as she came up to him.

“I should think as a nurse you ought to know better, my dear, than to ask,” he said testily.  “When a person is in my condition, enquiries of that sort are a mockery!”

“But one may be in less or more pain,” she said gently.  “I hoped Dr. Clarke’s treatment yesterday might have given you some relief.”

He did not vouchsafe an answer.  She took some work and sat down by him.  Mrs. Boyce, who had been tidying a table of food and medicine, came and asked him if he would be wheeled into another room across the gallery, which had been arranged as a sitting-room.  He shook his head irritably.

“I am not fit for it.  Can’t you see?  And I want to speak to Marcella.”

Mrs. Boyce went away.  Marcella waited, not without a tremor.  She was sitting in the sun, her head bent over the muslin strings she was hemming for her nurse’s bonnet.  The window was wide open; outside, the leaves under a warm breeze were gently drifting down into the Cedar Garden, amid a tangled mass of flowers, mostly yellow or purple.  To one side rose the dark layers of the cedars; to the other, the grey front of the library wing.

Mr. Boyce looked at her with the frown which had now become habitual to him, moved his lips once or twice without speaking; and at last made his effort.

“I should think, Marcella, you must often regret by now the step you took eighteen months ago!”

She grew pale.

“How regret it, papa?” she said, without looking up.

“Why, good God!” he said angrily; “I should think the reasons for regret are plain enough.  You threw over a man who was devoted to you, and could have given you the finest position in the county, for the most nonsensical reasons in the world—­reasons that by now, I am certain, you are ashamed of.”

He saw her wince, and enjoyed his prerogative of weakness.  In his normal health he would never have dared so to speak to her.  But of late, during long fits of feverish brooding—­intensified by her return home—­he had vowed to himself to speak his mind.

“Aren’t you ashamed of them?” he repeated, as she was silent.

She looked up.

“I am not ashamed of anything I did to save Hurd, if that is what you mean, papa.”

Mr. Boyce’s anger grew.

“Of course you know what everybody said?”

She stooped over her work again, and did not reply.

“It’s no good being sullen over it,” he said in exasperation; “I’m your father, and I’m dying.  I have a right to question you.  It’s my duty to see something settled, if I can, before I go.  Is it true that all the time you were attacking Raeburn about politics and the reprieve, and what not, you were really behaving as you never ought to have behaved, with Harry Wharton?”