“Your great-uncle!  Upon my word!  And who may he be, miss?  If it comes to that, I’d like to show my great-uncle David how you’ve scratched my wrist.  He’d give it you.  He’s almost as strong as father, though he is so old.  You get along with you, and behave yourself, and don’t talk stuff to me.”

Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself pushed out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her.  She rushed up to the top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in a hidden niche of the wall, shaking and crying,—­now planning vengeance on her conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection of her own ill-bred and impotent folly.

No—­during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory declared, were three:  the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday—­Marcella sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly allowance; the mad games of “tig,” which she led and organised in the top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Renier, Miss Frederick’s partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small sister of her own, and surreptitiously indulged “the little wild-cat,” as the school generally dubbed the Speaker’s great-niece, whenever she could.

But with the third year fresh elements and interests had entered in.  Romance awoke, and with it certain sentimental affections.  In the first place, a taste for reading had rooted itself—­reading of the adventurous and poetical kind.  There were two or three books which Marcella had absorbed in a way it now made her envious to remember.  For at twenty-one people who take interest in many things, and are in a hurry to have opinions, must skim and “turn over” books rather than read them, must use indeed as best they may a scattered and distracted mind, and suffer occasional pangs of conscience as pretenders.  But at thirteen—­what concentration! what devotion! what joy!  One of these precious volumes was Bulwer’s “Rienzi”; another was Miss Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs”; a third was a little red volume of “Marmion” which an aunt had given her.  She probably never read any of them through—­she had not a particle of industry or method in her composition—­but she lived in them.  The parts which it bored her to read she easily invented for herself, but the scenes and passages which thrilled her she knew by heart; she had no gift for verse-making, but she laboriously wrote a long poem on the death of Rienzi, and she tried again and again with a not inapt hand to illustrate for herself in pen and ink the execution of Wallace.

But all these loves for things and ideas were soon as nothing in comparison with a friendship, and an adoration.