“It depends upon how it is done.  I can arrange it, I think,” said Mrs. Boyce.  “A woman has always convenient limitations to plead in the way of health.  She need never give offence if she has decent wits.  It will be understood that I do not go out, and then someone—­Miss Raeburn or Lady Winterbourne—­will take up Marcella and mother her.”

She spoke with her usual light gentleness, but he was not appeased.

“If you were to talk of my health, it would be more to the purpose,” he said, with grim inconsequence.  And raising his heavy lids he looked at her full.

She got up and went over to him.

“Do you feel worse again?  Why will you not change your things directly you come in?  Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?”

She was standing close beside him; her beautiful hand, for which in their young days it had pleased his pride to give her rings, almost touched him.  A passionate hunger leapt within him.  She would stoop and kiss him if he asked her; he knew that.  But he would not ask her; he did not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give him again.

Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.

“Clarke does me no good—­not an atom,” he said, rising.  “There—­don’t you come.  I Can look after myself.”

He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room.  She put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so stood silent for long.  There was no sound audible in the room, or from the house outside.  And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor God.

* * * * *

“I shall go, for all our sakes,” thought Marcella, as she stood late that night brushing her hair before her dimly-lighted and rickety dressing-table.  “We have, it seems, no right to be proud.”

A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart—­pain, new-born and insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself.  Ever since Aldous Raeburn’s hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden invasion of a hot and shamed misery.  And to-night, after her talk with her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.

But her strong personality, her passionate sense of a moral independence not to be undone by the acts of another, even a father, made her soon impatient of her own distress, and she flung it from her with decision.

“No, we have no right to be proud,” she repeated to herself.  “It must be all true what Mr. Raeburn said—­probably a great deal more.  Poor, poor mamma!  But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty quarrelling and standing alone.  And it was so long ago.”

Her hand fell, and she stood absently looking at her own black and white reflection in the old flawed glass.

She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn.  He had been very prompt in her service.  There could be no question but that he was specially interested in her.