She gave herself up to it, in a trance interwoven with all the loveliest and deepest things she had ever felt—­with her memory of Hallin, with her new gropings after God.  Just as the light was going she got up hurriedly and went to her writing-table.  She wrote a little note, sat over it a while, with her face hidden in her hands, then sealed, addressed, and stamped it.  She went out herself to the hall to put it in the letter-box.  For the rest of the evening she went about in a state of dream, overcome sometimes by rushes of joy, which yet had in them exquisite elements of pain; hungering for the passage of the hours, for sleep that might cancel some of them; picturing the road to the Court and Widrington, along which the old postman had by now carried her letter—­the bands of moonlight and shade lying across it, the quiet of the budding woods, and the spot on the hillside where he had spoken to her in that glowing October.  It must lie all night in a dull office—­her letter; she was impatient and sorry for it.  And when he got it, it would tell him nothing, though she thought it would rather surprise him.  It was the merest formal request that he would, if he could, come and see her again the following morning on business.

During the evening Mrs. Boyce lay on the sofa and read.  It always still gave the daughter a certain shock of surprise when she saw the slight form resting in this way.  In words Mrs. Boyce would allow nothing, and her calm composure had been unbroken from the moment of their return home, though it was not yet two months since her husband’s death.  In these days she read enormously, which again was a new trait—­especially novels.  She read each through rapidly, laid it down without a word of comment, and took up another.  Once or twice, but very rarely, Marcella surprised her in absent meditation, her hand covering the page.  From the hard, satiric brightness of her look on these occasions it seemed probable that she was speculating on the discrepancies between fiction and real life, and on the falsity of most literary sentiment.

To-night Marcella sat almost silent—­she was making a frock for a village child she had carried off from its mother, who was very ill—­and Mrs. Boyce read.  But as the clock approached ten, the time when they generally went upstairs, Marcella made a few uncertain movements, and finally got up, took a stool, and sat down beside the sofa.

* * * * *

An hour later Marcella entered her own room.  As she closed the door behind her she gave an involuntary sob, put down her light, and hurrying up to the bed, fell on her knees beside it and wept long.  Yet her mother had not been unkind to her.  Far from it.  Mrs. Boyce had praised her—­in few words, but with evident sincerity—­for the courage that could, if necessary, put convention aside; had spoken of her own relief; had said pleasant things of Lord Maxwell; had bantered Marcella a little on her social schemes, and wished her the independence to stick to them.  Finally, as they got up to go to bed, she kissed Marcella twice instead of once, and said: