“Well, only wait till May, and the cowslips in your own fields will make up to you!” he said, smiling at her.  “But now, I have been wondering to myself in my room upstairs what you would like to see.  There are a good many treasures in this house, and you will care for them, because you are an artist.  But you shall not be bored with them!  You shall see what and as much as you like.  You had about a quarter of an hour’s talk with my aunt, did you not?” he asked, in a quite different tone.

So all the time while she and Miss Raeburn had been making acquaintance, he had known that she was in the house, and he had kept away for his own purposes!  Marcella felt a colour she could not restrain leap into her cheek.

“Miss Raeburn was very kind,” she said, with a return of shyness, which passed however the next moment by reaction, into her usual daring.  “Yes, she was very kind!—­but all the same she doesn’t like me—­I don’t think she is going to like me—­I am not her sort.”

“Have you been talking Socialism to her?” he asked her, smiling.

“No, not yet—­not yet,” she said emphatically.  “But I am dreadfully uncertain—­I can’t always hold my tongue—­I am afraid you will be sorry you took me up.”

“Are you so aggressive?  But Aunt Neta is so mild!—­she wouldn’t hurt a fly.  She mothers every one in the house and out of it.  The only people she is hard upon are the little servant girls, who will wear feathers in their hats!”

“There!” cried Marcella, indignantly.  “Why shouldn’t they wear feathers in their hats?  It is their form of beauty—­their tapestry!”

“But if one can’t have both feathers and boots?” he asked her humbly, a twinkle in his grey eye.  “If one hasn’t boots, one may catch a cold and die of it—­which is, after all, worse than going featherless.”

“But why can’t they have feathers and boots?  It is because you—­we—­have got too much.  You have the tapestry—­and—­and the pictures”—­she turned and looked round the room—­“and this wonderful house—­and the park.  Oh, no—­I think it is Miss Raeburn has too many feathers!”

“Perhaps it is,” he admitted, in a different tone, his look changing and saddening as though some habitual struggle of thought were recalled to him.  “You see I am in a difficulty.  I want to show you our feathers.  I think they would please you—­and you make me ashamed of them.”

“How absurd!” cried Marcella, “when I told you how I liked the school children bobbing to me!”

They laughed, and then Aldous looked round with a start—­“Ah, here is my grandfather!”

Then he stood back, watching the look with which Lord Maxwell, after greeting Lady Winterbourne, approached Miss Boyce.  He saw the old man’s somewhat formal approach, the sudden kindle in the blue eyes which marked the first effect of Marcella’s form and presence, the bow, the stately shake of the hand.  The lover hearing his own heart beat, realised that his beautiful lady had so far done well.