“Did I tell you my news of Minta Hurd?” she said.

No; Mary had heard nothing.  So Marcella told the grotesque and ugly news, as it seemed to her, which had reached her at Amalfi.  Jim Hurd’s widow was to be married again, to the queer lanky “professor of elocution,” with the Italian name and shifty eye, who lodged on the floor beneath her in Brown’s Buildings, and had been wont to come in of an evening and play comic songs to her and the children.  Marcella was vehemently sure that he was a charlatan—­that he got his living by a number of small dishonesties, that he had scented Minta’s pension.  But apart from the question whether he would make Minta a decent husband, or live upon her and beat her, was the fact itself of her re-marriage, in itself hideous to the girl.

“Marry him!” she said.  “Marry any one!  Isn’t it incredible?”

They were in front of the cottage.  Marcella paused a moment and looked at it.  She saw again in sharp vision the miserable woman fainting on the settle, the dwarf sitting, handcuffed, under the eye of his captors; she felt again the rush of that whirlwind of agony through which she had borne the wife’s helpless soul in that awful dawn.

And after that—­exit!—­with her “professor of elocution.”  It made the girl sick to think of.  And Mary, out of a Puseyite dislike of second marriage, felt and expressed much the same repulsion.

Well—­Minta Hurd was far away, and if she had been there to defend herself her powers of expression would have been no match for theirs.  Nor does youth understand such pleas as she might have urged.

“Will Lord Maxwell continue the pension?” said Mary.

Marcella stopped again, involuntarily.

“So that was his doing?” she said.  “I supposed as much.”

“You did not know?” cried Mary, in distress.  “Oh!  I believe I ought not to have said anything about it.”

“I always guessed it,” said Marcella, shortly, and they walked on in silence.

Presently they found themselves in front of Mrs. Jellison’s very trim and pleasant cottage, which lay farther along the common, to the left of the road to the Court.  There was an early pear-tree in blossom over the porch, and a swelling greenery of buds in the little garden.

“Will you come in?” said Mary.  “I should like to see Isabella Westall.”

Marcella started at the name.

“How is she?” she asked.

“Just the same.  She has never been in her right mind since.  But she is quite harmless and quiet.”

They found Mrs. Jellison on one side of the fire, with her daughter on the other, and the little six-year-old Johnnie playing between them.  Mrs. Jellison was straw-plaiting, twisting the straws with amazing rapidity, her fingers stained with red from the dye of them.  Isabella was, as usual, doing nothing.  She stared when Marcella and Mary came in, but she took no other notice of them.  Her powerful and tragic face had the look of something originally full of intention, from which spirit and meaning had long departed, leaving a fine but lifeless outline.  Marcella had seen it last on the night of the execution, in ghastly apparition at Minta Hurd’s window, when it might have been caught by some sculptor in quest of the secrets of violent expression, fixed in clay or marble, and labelled “Revenge,” or “Passion.”