So much for romance, for feelings as much like love as childhood can know them, full of kindling charm and mystery.  Her friendship had been of course different, but it also left deep mark.  A tall, consumptive girl among the Cliff House pupils, the motherless daughter of a clergyman-friend of Miss Frederick’s, had for some time taken notice of Marcella, and at length won her by nothing else, in the first instance, than a remarkable gift for story-telling.  She was a parlour-boarder, had a room to herself, and a fire in it when the weather was cold.  She was not held strictly to lesson hours; many delicacies in the way of food were provided for her, and Miss Frederick watched over her with a quite maternal solicitude.  When winter came she developed a troublesome cough, and the doctor recommended that a little suite of rooms looking south and leading out on the middle terrace of the garden should be given up to her.  There was a bedroom, an intermediate dressing-room, and then a little sitting-room built out upon the terrace, with a window-door opening upon it.

Here Mary Lant spent week after week.  Whenever lesson hours were done she clamoured for Marcie Boyce, and Marcella was always eager to go to her.  She would fly up stairs and passages, knock at the bedroom door, run down the steps to the queer little dressing-room where the roof nearly came on your head, and down more steps again to the sitting-room.  Then when the door was shut, and she was crooning over the fire with her friend, she was entirely happy.  The tiny room was built on the edge of the terrace, the ground fell rapidly below it, and the west window commanded a broad expanse of tame arable country, of square fields and hedges, and scattered wood.  Marcella, looking back upon that room, seemed always to see it flooded with the rays of wintry sunset, a kettle boiling on the fire, her pale friend in a shawl crouching over the warmth, and the branches of a snowberry tree, driven by the wind, beating against the terrace door.

But what a story-teller was Mary Lant!  She was the inventor of a story called “John and Julia,” which went on for weeks and months without ever producing the smallest satiety in Marcella.  Unlike her books of adventure, this was a domestic drama of the purest sort; it was extremely moral and evangelical, designed indeed by its sensitively religious author for Marcie’s correction and improvement.  There was in it a sublime hero, who set everybody’s faults to rights and lectured the heroine.  In real life Marcella would probably before long have been found trying to kick his shins—­a mode of warfare of which in her demon moods she was past mistress.  But as Mary Lant described him, she not only bore with and trembled before him—­she adored him.  The taste for him and his like, as well as for the story-teller herself—­a girl of a tremulous, melancholy fibre, sweet-natured, possessed by a Calvinist faith, and already prescient of death—­grew