“You must let me say that I see a decided likeness in you to your grandfather,” said Lord Maxwell, when they were all seated at lunch, Marcella on his left hand, opposite to Lady Winterbourne.  “He was one of my dearest friends.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about him,” said Marcella, rather bluntly, “except what I have got out of old letters.  I never saw him that I remember.”

Lord Maxwell left the subject, of course, at once, but showed a great wish to talk to her, and make her talk.  He had pleasant things to say about Mellor and its past, which could be said without offence; and some conversation about the Boyce monuments in Mellor church led to a discussion of the part played by the different local families in the Civil Wars, in which it seemed to Aldous that his grandfather tried in various shrewd and courteous ways to make Marcella feel at ease with herself and her race, accepted, as it were, of right into the local brotherhood, and so to soothe and heal those bruised feelings he could not but divine.

The girl carried herself a little loftily, answering with an independence and freedom beyond her age and born of her London life.  She was not in the least abashed or shy.  Yet it was clear that Lord Maxwell’s first impressions were favourable.  Aldous caught every now and then his quick, judging look sweeping over her and instantly withdrawn—­comparing, as the grandson very well knew, every point, and tone, and gesture with some inner ideal of what a Raeburn’s wife should be.  How dream-like the whole scene was to Aldous, yet how exquisitely real!  The room, with its carved and gilt cedar-wood panels, its Vandykes, its tall windows opening on the park, the autumn sun flooding the gold and purple fruit on the table, and sparkling on the glass and silver, the figures of his aunt and Lady Winterbourne, the moving servants, and dominant of it all, interpreting it all for him anew, the dark, lithe creature beside his grandfather, so quick, sensitive, extravagant, so much a woman, yet, to his lover’s sense, so utterly unlike any other woman he had ever seen—­every detail of it was charged to him with a thousand new meanings, now oppressive, now delightful.

For he was passing out of the first stage of passion, in which it is, almost, its own satisfaction, so new and enriching is it to the whole nature, into the second stage—­the stage of anxiety, incredulity.  Marcella, sitting there on his own ground, after all his planning, seemed to him not nearer, but further from him.  She was terribly on her dignity!  Where was all that girlish abandonment gone which she had shown him on that walk, beside the gate?  There had been a touch of it, a divine touch, before luncheon.  How could he get her to himself again?

Meanwhile the conversation passed to the prevailing local topic—­the badness of the harvest, the low prices of everything, the consequent depression among the farmers, and stagnation in the villages.