As they left the dining-room, after their short evening meal, to go up to Mr. Boyce, Marcella detained her mother an instant.

“Mamma, will you please not tell papa that—­that Lord Maxwell came here this afternoon?  And will you explain to him why I am going there to-morrow?”

Mrs. Boyce’s fair cheek flushed.  Marcella saw that she understood.

“If I were you, I should not let your father talk to you any more about those things,” she said with a certain proud impatience.

“If I can help it!” exclaimed Marcella.  “Will you tell him, mamma,—­about Mr. Hallin?—­and how good he has been to me?”

Then her voice failed her, and, hurriedly leaving her mother at the top of the stairs, she went away by herself to struggle with a grief and smart almost unbearable.

That night passed quietly at the Court.  Hallin was at intervals slightly delirious, but less so than the night before; and in the early morning the young doctor, who had sat up with him, reported him to Aldous as calmer and a little stronger.  But the heart mischief was hopeless, and might bring the bruised life to an end at any moment.

He could not, however, be kept in bed, owing to restlessness and difficulty of breathing, and by midday he was in Aldous’s sitting-room, drawn close to the window, that he might delight his eyes with the wide range of wood and plain that it commanded.  After a very wet September, the October days were now following each other in a settled and sunny peace.  The great woods of the Chilterns, just yellowing towards that full golden moment—­short, like all perfection,—­which only beeches know, rolled down the hill-slopes to the plain, their curving lines cut here and there by straight fir stems, drawn clear and dark on the pale background of sky and lowland.  In the park, immediately below the window, groups of wild cherry and of a slender-leaved maple made spots of “flame and amethyst” on the smooth falling lawns; the deer wandered and fed, and the squirrels were playing and feasting among the beech nuts.

Since Aldous and his poor sister had brought him home from the Bethnal Green hall in which the Land Reform Conference had been held, Hallin had spoken little, except in delirium, and that little had been marked by deep and painful depression.  But this morning, when Aldous was summoned by the nurse, and found him propped up by the window, in front of the great view, he saw gracious signs of change.  Death, indeed, already in possession, looked from the blue eyes so plainly that Aldous, on his first entrance, had need of all his own strength of will to keep his composure.  But with the certainty of that great release, and with the abandonment of all physical and mental struggle—­the struggle of a lifetime—­Hallin seemed to-day to have recovered something of his characteristic serenity and blitheness—­the temper which had made him the leader of his Oxford contemporaries, and the dear comrade of his friend’s life.