Her voice fell.  Glancing up at him involuntarily, her eye looked with dread for some chill, some stiffening in him.  Probably he condemned her, had always condemned her for deserting her home and her parents.  But instead she saw nothing but sympathy.

“Mrs. Boyce has had a hard life,” he said, with grave feeling.

Marcella felt a tear leap, and furtively raised her handkerchief to brush it away.  Then, with a natural selfishness, her quick thought took another turn.  A wild yearning rose in her mind to tell him much more than she had ever done in old days of the miserable home-circumstances of her early youth; to lay stress on the mean unhappiness which had depressed her own child-nature whenever she was with her parents, and had withered her mother’s character.  Secretly, passionately, she often made the past an excuse.  Excuse for what?  For the lack of delicacy and loyalty, of the best sort of breeding, which had marked the days of her engagement?

Never—­never to speak of it with him!—­to pour out everything—­to ask him to judge, to understand, to forgive!—­

She pulled herself together by a strong effort, reminding herself in a flash of all that divided them:—­of womanly pride—­of Betty Macdonald’s presence at the Court—­of that vain confidence to Hallin, of which her inmost being must have been ashamed, but that something calming and sacred stole upon her whenever she thought of Hallin, lifting everything concerned with him into a category of its own.

No; let her selfish weakness make no fettering claim upon the man before her.  Let her be content with the friendship she had, after all, achieved, that was now doing its kindly best for her.

All these images, like a tumultuous procession, ran through the mind in a moment.  He thought, as she sat there with her bent head, the hands clasped round the knee in the way he knew so well, that she was full of her mother, and found it difficult to put what she felt into words.

“But tell me about your plan,” he said gently, “if you will.”

“Oh! it is nothing,” she said hurriedly.  “I am afraid you will think it impracticable—­perhaps wrong.  It’s only this:  you see, as there is no one depending on me—­as I am practically alone—­it seemed to me I might make an experiment.  Four thousand a year is a great deal more than I need ever spend—­than I ought, of course, to spend on myself.  I don’t think altogether what I used to think.  I mean to keep up this house—­to make it beautiful, to hand it on, perhaps more beautiful than I found it, to those that come after.  And I mean to maintain enough service in it both to keep it in order and to make it a social centre for all the people about—­for everybody of all classes, so far as I can.  I want it to be a place of amusement and delight and talk to us all—­especially to the very poor.  After all”—­her cheek flushed under the quickening of her thought—­“everybody