Then he walked to the table, took up his letter, read it, tore it across, and locked the fragments in a drawer.

“Not yet, Ned—­not yet, dear old fellow, even to you,” he said to himself, as he put out his lamp.

CHAPTER VII.

Three days passed.  On the fourth Marcella returned late in the afternoon from a round of parish visits with Mary Harden.  As she opened the oak doors which shut off the central hall of Mellor from the outer vestibule, she saw something white lying on the old cut and disused billiard table, which still occupied the middle of the floor till Richard Boyce, in the course of his economies and improvements, could replace it by a new one.

She ran forward and took up a sheaf of cards, turning them over in a smiling excitement.  “Viscount Maxwell,” “Mr. Raeburn,” “Miss Raeburn,” “Lady Winterbourne and the Misses Winterbourne,” two cards of Lord Winterbourne’s—­all perfectly in form.

Then a thought flashed upon her.  “Of course it is his doing—­and I asked him!”

The cards dropped from her hand on the billiard table, and she stood looking at them, her pride fighting with her pleasure.  There was something else in her feeling too—­the exultation of proved power over a person not, as she guessed, easily influenced, especially by women.

“Marcella, is that you?”

It was her mother’s voice.  Mrs. Boyce had come in from the garden through the drawing-room, and was standing at the inner door of the hall, trying with shortsighted eyes to distinguish her daughter among the shadows of the great bare place.  A dark day was drawing to its close, and there was little light left in the hall, except in one corner where a rainy sunset gleam struck a grim contemporary portrait of Mary Tudor, bringing out the obstinate mouth and the white hand holding a jewelled glove.

Marcella turned, and by the same gleam her mother saw her flushed and animated look.

“Any letters?” she asked.

“No; but there are some cards.  Oh yes, there is a note,” and she pounced upon an envelope she had overlooked.  “It is for you, mother—­from the Court.”

Mrs. Boyce came up and took note and cards from her daughter’s hand.  Marcella watched her with quick breath.

Her mother looked through the cards, slowly putting them down one by one without remark.

“Oh, mother! do read the note!” Marcella could not help entreating.

Mrs. Boyce drew herself together with a quick movement as though her daughter jarred upon her, and opened the note.  Marcella dared not look over her.  There was a dignity about her mother’s lightest action, about every movement of her slender fingers and fine fair head, which had always held the daughter in check, even while she rebelled.

Mrs. Boyce read it, and then handed it to Marcella.

“I must go and make the tea,” she said, in a light, cold tone, and turning, she went back to the drawing-room, whither afternoon tea had just been carried.