“Papa, if anything of that sort were done, I should take care Mr. Raeburn knew I had had nothing to do with it—­in such a way that it would be impossible for him to carry it further.  Dear papa, don’t think of such a thing any more.  Because I treated Mr. Raeburn unjustly last year, are we now to harass and persecute him?  I would sooner disappear from everybody I know—­from you and mamma, from England—­and never be heard of again.”

She stopped a moment—­struggling for composure—­that she might not excite him too much.

“Besides, it would be absurd!  You forget I have seen a good deal of Mr. Raeburn lately—­while I have been with the Winterbournes.  He has entirely given up all thought of me.  Even my vanity could see that plainly enough.  His best friends expect him to marry a bright, fascinating little creature of whom I saw a good deal in James Street—­a Miss Macdonald.”

“Miss how—­much?” he asked roughly.

She repeated the name, and then dwelt, with a certain amount of confusion and repetition, upon the probabilities of the matter—­half conscious all the time that she was playing a part, persuading herself and him of something she was not at all clear about in her own inner mind—­but miserably, passionately determined to go through with it all the same.

He bore with what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet also half incredulous.  He had always been obstinate, and the approach of death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised the bodily frame.  He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some way yet of testing the matter in spite of her.  He would think it out.

Meanwhile, step by step, she brought the conversation to less dangerous things, and she was finally gliding into some chat about the Winterbournes when he interrupted her abruptly—­

“And that other fellow—­Wharton.  Your mother tells me you have seen him in London.  Has he been making love to you?”

“Suppose I won’t be catechised!” she said gaily, determined to allow no more tragedy of any kind.  “Besides, papa, you can’t read your gossip as good people should.  Mr. Wharton’s engagement to a certain Lady Selina Farrell—­a distant cousin of the Winterbournes—­was announced, in several papers with great plainness three weeks ago.”

At that moment her mother came in, looking anxiously at them both, and half resentfully at Marcella.  Marcella, sore and bruised in every moral fibre, got up to go.

Something in the involuntary droop of her beautiful head as she left the room drew her father’s eyes after her, and for the time his feeling towards her softened curiously.  Well, she had not made very much of her life so far!  That old strange jealousy of her ability, her beauty, and her social place, he had once felt so hotly, died away.  He wished her, indeed, to be Lady Maxwell.  Yet for the moment there was a certain balm in the idea that she too—­her mother’s daughter—­with her Merritt blood—­could be unlucky.