“I didn’t know you were going to call,” said Frank, bewildered.  “Isn’t it too soon?”

And he looked at his companion in astonishment.

“I came to speak to Miss Boyce and her mother on business,” said Aldous, with all his habitual reserve.  “I thought you wouldn’t mind the walk back by yourself.”

“Business?” the boy echoed involuntarily.

Aldous hesitated, then said quietly: 

“Mr. Boyce appointed me executor under his will.”

Frank lifted his eyebrows, and allowed himself at least an inward “By Jove!”

By this time Marcella had caught sight of them, and was advancing.  She was in deep mourning, but her hands were full of primroses, which shone against the black; and the sun, penetrating the thin green of some larches to her left, danced in her eyes and on a face full of sensitive and beautiful expression.

They had not met since they stood together beside Hallin’s grave.  This fact was in both their minds.  Aldous felt it, as it were, in the touch of her hand.  What he could not know was, that she was thinking quite as much of his letter to her mother and its phrases.

They stood talking a little in the sunshine.  Then, as Frank was taking his leave, Marcella said: 

“Won’t you wait for—­for Lord Maxwell, in the old library?  We can get at it from the garden, and I have made it quite habitable.  My mother, of course, does not wish to see anybody.”

Frank hesitated, then, pushed by a certain boyish curiosity, and by the angry belief that Betty had been carried off by Miss Raeburn, and was out of his reach till luncheon-time, said he would wait.  Marcella led the way, opened the garden-door of the lower corridor, close to the spot where she had seen Wharton standing in the moonlight on a never-to-be-forgotten night, and then ushered them into the library.  The beautiful old place had been decently repaired, though in no sense modernised.  The roof had no holes, and its delicate stucco-work, formerly stained and defaced by damp, had been whitened, so that the brown and golden tones of the books in the latticed cases told against it with delightful effect.  The floor was covered with a cheap matting, and there were a few simple chairs and tables.  A wood fire burnt on the old hearth.  Marcella’s books and work lay about, and some shallow earthenware pans filled with home-grown hyacinths scented the air.  What with the lovely architecture of the room itself, its size, its books and old portraits, and the signs it bore of simple yet refined use, it would have been difficult to find a gentler, mellower place.  Aldous looked round him with delight.

“I hope to make a village drawing-room of it in time,” she said casually to Frank as she stooped to put a log on the fire.  “I think we shall get them to come, as it has a separate door, and scraper, and mat all to itself.”

“Goodness!” said Frank, “they won’t come.  It’s too far from the village.”