“Believe me,

  “Yours most sincerely,

  “MAXWELL.”

“You will find it difficult, my dear, to write a snub in answer to that letter,” said Mrs. Boyce, drily, as Marcella laid it down.

Marcella’s face was, indeed, crimson with perplexity and feeling.

“Well, we can think it over,” she said as she went away.

Mrs. Boyce pondered the matter a good deal when she was left alone.  The signs of reaction and change in Marcella were plain enough.  What they precisely meant, and how much, was another matter.  As to him, Marcella’s idea of another attachment might be true, or might be merely the creation of her own irritable pride.  Anyway, he was in the mood to write a charming letter.  Mrs. Boyce’s blanched lip had all its natural irony as she thought it over.  To her mind Aldous Raeburn’s manners had always been a trifle too good, whether for his own interests or for this wicked world.  And if he had any idea now of trying again, let him, for Heaven’s sake, not be too yielding or too eager!  “It was always the way,” thought Mrs. Boyce, remembering a child in white frock and baby shoes—­“if you wished to make her want anything, you had to take it away from her.”

Meanwhile the mere thought that matters might even yet so settle themselves drew from the mother a long breath of relief.  She had spent an all but sleepless night, tormented by Marcella’s claim upon her.  After twenty years of self-suppression this woman of forty-five, naturally able, original, and independent, had seen a glimpse of liberty.  In her first youth she had been betrayed as a wife, degraded as a member of society.  A passion she could not kill, combined with some stoical sense of inalienable obligation, had combined to make her both the slave and guardian of her husband up to middle life; and her family and personal pride, so strong in her as a girl, had found its only outlet in this singular estrangement she had achieved between herself and every other living being, including her own daughter.  Now her husband was dead, and all sorts of crushed powers and desires, mostly of the intellectual sort, had been strangely reviving within her.  Just emerged, as she was, from the long gloom of nursing, she already wished to throw it all behind her—­to travel, to read, to make acquaintances—­she who had lived as a recluse for twenty years!  There was in it a last clutch at youth, at life.  And she had no desire to enter upon this new existence—­in comradeship with Marcella.  They were independent and very different human beings.  That they were mother and daughter was a mere physical accident.

Moreover, though she was amply conscious of the fine development in Marcella during the past two years, it is probable that she felt her daughter even less congenial to her now than of old.  For the rich, emotional nature had, as we have seen, “suffered conviction,” had turned in the broad sense to “religion,” was more and more sensitive, especially since Hallin’s death, to the spiritual things and symbols in the world.  At Naples she had haunted churches; had read, as her mother knew, many religious books.