“I’m sure you know you’re talking nonsense,” he said sulkily, though he shrank from meeting her fiery look.  “And if I am idle, there are plenty of people idler than me—­people who live on their money, with no land to bother about, and nothing to do for it at all.”

“On the contrary, it is they who have an excuse.  They have no natural opening, perhaps—­no plain call.  You have both, and, as I said before, you have no right to take holidays before you have earned them.  You have got to learn your business first, and then do it.  Give your eight hours’ day like other people!  Who are you that you should have all the cake of the world, and other people the crusts?”

Frank walked to the window, and stood staring out, with his back turned to her.  Her words stung and tingled; and he was too miserable to fight.

“I shouldn’t care whether it were cake or crusts,” he said at last, in a low voice, turning round to her, “if only Betty would have me.”

“Do you think she is any the more likely to have you,” said Marcella, unrelenting, “if you behave as a loafer and a runaway?  Don’t you suppose that Betty has good reasons for hesitating when she sees the difference between you—­and—­and other people?”

Frank looked at her sombrely—­a queer mixture of expressions on the face, in which the maturer man was already to be discerned at war with the powerful young animal.

“I suppose you mean Lord Maxwell?”

There was a pause.

“You may take what I said,” she said at last, looking into the fire, “as meaning anybody who pays honestly with work and brains for what society has given him—­as far as he can pay, at any rate.”

“Now look here,” said Frank, coming dolefully to sit down beside her; “don’t slate me any more.  I’m a bad lot, I know—­well, an idle lot—­I don’t think I am a bad lot—­But it’s no good your preaching to me while Betty’s sticking pins into me like this.  Now just let me tell you how she’s been behaving.”

Marcella succumbed, and heard him.  He glanced at her surreptitiously from time to time, but he could make nothing of her.  She sat very quiet while he described the constant companionship between Aldous and Betty, and the evident designs of Miss Raeburn.  Just as when he made his first confidences to her in London, he was vaguely conscious that he was doing a not very gentlemanly thing.  But again, he was too unhappy to restrain himself, and he longed somehow to make an ally of her.

“Well, I have only one thing to say,” she said at last, with an odd nervous impatience—­“go and ask her, and have done with it!  She might have some respect for you then.  No, I won’t help you; but if you don’t succeed, I’ll pity you—­I promise you that.  And now you must go away.”

He went, feeling himself hardly treated, yet conscious nevertheless of a certain stirring of the moral waters which had both stimulus and balm in it.