She pressed her hands over her eyes in a passion of humiliation and disgust.  Mrs. Boyce watched her closely.

“We must wait, anyway, for his letter,” she said.  “It ought to be here by to-morrow morning.”

Marcella sank on a chair by an open glass door, her eyes wandering, through the straggling roses growing against the wall of the stone balcony outside, to the laughing purples and greens of the sea.

“Of course,” she said unhappily, “it is most probable he will consent.  It would not be like him to refuse.  But, mamma, you must write. I must write and beg him not to do it.  It is quite simple.  We can manage everything for ourselves.  Oh! how could papa?” she broke out again in a low wail, “how could he?”

Mrs. Boyce’s lips tightened sharply.  It seemed to her a foolish question. She, at least, had had the experience of twenty years out of which to answer it.  Death had made no difference.  She saw her husband’s character and her own seared and broken life with the same tragical clearness; she felt the same gnawing of an affection not to be plucked out while the heart still beat.  This act of indelicacy and injustice was like many that had gone before it; and there was in it the same evasion and concealment towards herself.  No matter.  She had made her account with it all twenty years before.  What astonished her was, that the force of her strong coercing will had been able to keep him for so long within the limits of the smaller and meaner immoralities of this world.

“Have you read the rest of the will?” she asked, after a long pause.

Marcella lifted it again, and began listlessly to go through it.

“Mamma!” she said presently, looking up, the colour flushing back into her face, “I find no mention of you in it throughout.  There seems to be no provision for you.”

“There is none,” said Mrs. Boyce, quietly.  “There was no need.  I have my own income.  We lived upon it for years before your father succeeded to Mellor.  It is therefore amply sufficient for me now.”

“You cannot imagine,” cried Marcella, trembling in every limb, “that I am going to take the whole of my father’s estate, and leave nothing—­nothing for his wife.  It would be impossible—­unseemly.  It would be to do me an injustice, mamma, as well as yourself,” she added proudly.

“No, I think not,” said Mrs. Boyce, with her usual cold absence of emotion.  “You do not yet understand the situation.  Your father’s misfortunes nearly ruined the estate for a time.  Your grandfather went through great trouble, and raised large sums to—­” she paused for the right phrase—­“to free us from the consequences of your father’s actions.  I benefited, of course, as much as he did.  Those sums crippled all your grandfather’s old age.  He was a man to whom I was attached—­whom I respected.  Mellor, I believe, had never been embarrassed before.  Well, your uncle did a little