towards recovery—­but on the whole he was a fool.  Your father has done much more, and you, no doubt, will complete it.  As for me, I have no claim to anything more from Mellor.  The place itself is”—­again she stopped for a word of which the energy, when it came, seemed to escape her—­“hateful to me.  I shall feel freer if I have no tie to it.  And at last I persuaded your father to let me have my way.”

Marcella rose from her seat impetuously, walked quickly across the room, and threw herself on her knees beside her mother.

“Mamma, are you still determined—­now that we two are alone in the world—­to act towards me, to treat me as though I were not your daughter—­not your child at all, but a stranger?”

It was a cry of anguish.  A sudden slight tremor swept over Mrs. Boyce’s thin and withered face.  She braced herself to the inevitable.

“Don’t let us make a tragedy of it, my dear,” she said, with a light touch on Marcella’s hands.  “Let us discuss it reasonably.  Won’t you sit down?  I am not proposing anything very dreadful.  But, like you, I have some interests of my own, and I should be glad to follow them—­now—­a little.  I wish to spend some of the year in London; to make that, perhaps, my headquarters, so as to see something of some old friends whom I have had no intercourse with for years—­perhaps also of my relations.”  She spoke of them with a particular dryness.  “And I should be glad—­after this long time—­to be somewhat taken out of oneself, to read, to hear what is going on, to feed one’s mind a little.”

Marcella, looking at her, saw a kind of feverish light, a sparkling intensity in the pale blue eyes, that filled her with amazement.  What, after all, did she know of this strange individuality from which her own being had taken its rise?  The same flesh and blood—­what an irony of nature!

“Of course,” continued Mrs. Boyce, “I should go to you, and you would come to me.  It would only be for part of the year.  Probably we should get more from each other’s lives so.  As you know, I long to see things as they are, not conventionally.  Anyway, whether I were there or no, you would probably want some companion to help you in your work and plans.  I am not fit for them.  And it would be easy to find some one who could act as chaperon in my absence.”

The hot tears sprang to Marcella’s eyes.  “Why did you send me away from you, mamma, all my childhood,” she cried.  “It was wrong—­cruel.  I have no brother or sister.  And you put me out of your life when I had no choice, when I was too young to understand.”

Mrs. Boyce winced, but made no reply.  She sat with her delicate hand across her brow.  She was the white shadow of her former self; but her fragility had always seemed to Marcella more indomitable than anybody else’s strength.

Sobs began to rise in Marcella’s throat.