“Mary!” she broke out as they neared the Rectory, “I shall be twenty-four directly.  How much harm do you think I shall have done here by the time I am sixty-four?”

Mary laughed at her, and tried to cheer her.  But Marcella was in the depths of self-disgust.

“What is wanted, really wanted,” she said with intensity, “is not my help, but their growth.  How can I make them take for themselves—­take, roughly and selfishly even, if they will only take!  As for my giving, what relation has it to anything real or lasting?”

Mary was scandalised.

“I declare you are as bad as Mr. Craven,” she said.  “He told Charles yesterday that the curtseys of the old women in the village to him and Charles—­women old enough to be their grandmothers—­sickened him of the whole place, and that he should regard it as the chief object of his work here to make such things impossible in the future.  Or perhaps you’re still of Mr.—­Mr. Wharton’s opinion—­you’ll be expecting Charles and me to give up charity.  But it’s no good, my dear.  We’re not ‘advanced,’ and we never shall be.”

At the mention of Wharton Marcella threw her proud head back; wave after wave of changing expression passed over the face.

“I often remember the things Mr. Wharton said in this village,” she said at last.  “There was life and salt and power in many of them.  It’s not what he said, but what he was, that one wants to forget.”

They parted presently, and Marcella went heavily home.  The rising of the spring, the breath of the April air, had never yet been sad and oppressive to her as they were to-day.

CHAPTER VI.

“Oh!  Miss Boyce, may I come in?”

The voice was Frank Leven’s.  Marcella was sitting in the old library alone late on the following afternoon.  Louis Craven, who was now her paid agent and adviser, had been with her, and she had accounts and estimates before her.

“Come in,” she said, startled a little by Frank’s tone and manner, and looking at him interrogatively.

Frank shut the heavy old door carefully behind him.  Then, as he advanced to her she saw that his flushed face wore an expression unlike anything she had yet seen there—­of mingled joy and fear.

She drew back involuntarily.

“Is there anything—­anything wrong?”

“No,” he said impetuously, “no!  But I have something to tell you, and I don’t know how.  I don’t know whether I ought.  I have run almost all the way from the Court.”

And, indeed, he could hardly get his breath.  He took a stool she pushed to him, and tried to collect himself.  She heard her heart beat as she waited for him to speak.

“It’s about Lord Maxwell,” he said at last, huskily, turning his head away from her to the fire.  “I’ve just had a long walk with him.  Then he left me; he had no idea I came on here.  But something drove me; I felt I must come, I must tell.  Will you promise not to be angry with me—­to believe that I’ve thought about it—­that I’m doing it for the best?”