Now Mrs. Boyce in these matters had a curious history.  She had begun life as an ardent Christian, under evangelical influences.  Her husband, on the other hand, at the time she married him was a man of purely sceptical opinions, a superficial disciple of Mill and Comte, and fond of an easy profanity which seemed to place him indisputably with the superior persons of this world.  To the amazement and scandal of her friends, Evelyn Merritt had not been three months his wife before she had adopted his opinions en bloc, and was carrying them out to their logical ends with a sincerity and devotion quite unknown to her teacher.  Thenceforward her conception of things—­of which, however, she seldom spoke—­had been actively and even vehemently rationalist; and it had been one of the chief sorenesses and shames of her life at Mellor that, in order to suit his position as country squire, Richard Boyce had sunk to what, in her eyes, were a hundred mean compliances with things orthodox and established.

Then, in his last illness, he had finally broken away from her, and his own past.  “Evelyn, I should like to see a clergyman,” he had said to her in his piteous voice, “and I shall ask him to give me the Sacrament.”  She had made every arrangement accordingly; but her bitter soul could see nothing in the step but fear and hypocrisy; and he knew it.  And as he lay talking alone with the man whom they had summoned, two or three nights before the end, she, sitting in the next room, had been conscious of a deep and smarting jealousy.  Had not the hard devotion of twenty years made him at least her own?  And here was this black-coated reciter of incredible things stepping into her place.  Only in death she recovered him wholly.  No priest interfered while he drew his last breath upon her bosom.

And now Marcella!  Yet the girl’s voice and plea tugged at her withered heart.  She felt a dread of unknown softnesses—­of being invaded and weakened by things in her akin to her daughter, and so captured afresh.  Her mind fell upon the bare idea of a revival of the Maxwell engagement, and caressed it.

Meanwhile Marcella stood dressing by the open window in the sunlight, which filled the room with wavy reflections caught from the sea.  Fishing-boats were putting off from the beach, three hundred feet below her; she could hear the grating of the keels, the songs of the boatmen.  On the little breakwater to the right an artist’s white umbrella shone in the sun; and a half-naked boy, poised on the bows of a boat moored beside the painter, stood bent in the eager attitude of one about to drop the bait into the blue wave below.  His brown back burnt against the water.  Cliff, houses, sea, glowed in warmth and light; the air was full of roses and orange-blossom; and to an English sense had already the magic of summer.

And Marcella’s hands, as she coiled and plaited her black hair, moved with a new lightness; for the first time since her father’s death her look had its normal fire, crossed every now and then by something that made her all softness and all woman.  No! as her mother said, one could not snub that letter or its writer.  But how to answer it!  In imagination she had already penned twenty different replies.  How not to be grasping or effusive, and yet to show that you could feel and repay kindness—­there was the problem!