CHAPTER III.
Aldous advanced into the inner hall at sight of Marcella, leaving his companions behind in the vestibule taking off their coats. Marcella ran to him.
"Papa is ill!" she said to him hastily. "Mamma has sent for Dr. Clarke. She won't let me go up, and wants us to take no notice and have tea without her."
"I am so sorry! Can we do anything? The dogcart is here with a fast horse. If your messenger went on foot—"
"Oh, no! they are sure to have sent the boy on the pony. I don't know why, but I have had a presentiment for a long time past that papa was going to be ill."
She looked white and excited. She had turned back to the drawing-room, forgetting the other guests, he walking beside her. As they passed along the dim hall, Aldous had her hand close in his, and when they passed under an archway at the further end he stooped suddenly in the shadows and kissed the hand. Touch—kiss—had the clinging, the intensity of passion.
They were the expression of all that had lain vibrating at the man's inmost heart during the dark drive, while he had been chatting with his two companions.
"My darling! I hope not. Would you rather not see strangers? Shall I send Hallin and young Leven away? They would understand at once."
"Oh, no! Mr. Wharton is here anyway—staying. Where is Mr. Hallin? I had forgotten him."
Aldous turned and called. Mr. Hallin and young Frank Leven, divining something unusual, were looking at the pictures in the hall.
Edward Hallin came up and took Marcella's offered hand. Each looked at the other with a special attention and interest. "She holds my friend's life in her hands—is she worthy of it?" was naturally the question hanging suspended in the man's judgment. The girl's manner was proud and shy, the manner of one anxious to please, yet already, perhaps, on the defensive.
Aldous explained the position of affairs, and Hallin expressed his sympathy. He had a singularly attractive voice, the voice indeed of the orator, which can adapt itself with equal charm and strength to the most various needs and to any pitch. As he spoke, Marcella was conscious of a sudden impression that she already knew him and could be herself with him at once.
"Oh, I say," broke in young Leven, who was standing behind; "don't you be bothered with us, Miss Boyce. Just send us back at once. I'm awfully sorry!"
"No; you are to come in!" she said, smiling through her pallor, which was beginning to pass away, and putting out her hand to him—the young Eton and Oxford athlete, just home for his Christmas vacation, was a great favourite with her—"You must come and have tea and cheer me up by telling me all the things you have killed this week. Is there anything left alive? You had come down to the fieldfares, you know, last Tuesday."
He followed her, laughing and protesting, and she led the way to the drawing-room. But as her fingers were on the handle she once more caught sight of the maid, Deacon, standing on the stairs, and ran to speak to her.
"He is better," she said, coming back with a face of glad relief. "The attack seems to be passing off. Mamma can't come down, but she begs that we will all enjoy ourselves."
"We'll endeavour," said young Leven, rubbing his hands, "by the help of tea. Miss Boyce, will you please tell Aldous and Mr. Hallin not to talk politics when they're taking me out to a party. They should fight a man of their own size. I'm all limp and trampled on, and want you to protect me."
The group moved, laughing and talking, into the drawing-room.
"Jiminy!" said Leven, stopping short behind Aldous, who was alone conscious of the lad's indignant astonishment; "what the deuce is he doing here?"
For there on the rug, with his back to the fire, stood Wharton, surveying the party with his usual smiling aplomb.
"Mr. Hallin, do you know Mr. Wharton?" said Marcella.
"Mr. Wharton and I have met several times on public platforms," said Hallin, holding out his hand, which Wharton took with effusion. Aldous greeted him with the impassive manner, the "three finger" manner, which was with him an inheritance—though not from his grandfather—and did not contribute to his popularity in the neighbourhood. As for young Leven, he barely nodded to the Radical candidate, and threw himself into a chair as far from the fire as possible.
"Frank and I have met before to-day!" said Wharton, laughing.
"Yes, I've been trying to undo some of your mischief," said the boy, bluntly. "I found him, Miss Boyce, haranguing a lot of men at the dinner-hour at Tudley End—one of our villages, you know—cramming them like anything—all about the game laws, and our misdeeds—my father's, of course."
Wharton raised a protesting hand.
"Oh—all very well! Of course it was us you meant! Well, when he'd driven off, I got up on a cart and had my say. I asked them whether they didn't all come out at our big shoots, and whether they didn't have almost as much fun as we did—why! the schoolmaster and the postman come to ask to carry cartridges, and everybody turns out, down to the cripples!—whether they didn't have rabbits given them all the year round; whether half of them hadn't brothers and sons employed somehow about the game, well-paid, and well-treated; whether any man-jack of them would be a ha'porth better off if there were no game; whether many of them wouldn't be worse off; and whether England wouldn't be a beastly dull place to live in, if people like him"—he pointed to Wharton—"had the governing of it! And I brought 'em all round too. I got them cheering and laughing. Oh! I can tell you old Dodgson'll have to take me on. He says he'll ask me to speak for him at several places. I'm not half bad, I declare I'm not."
"I thought they gave you a holiday task at Eton," observed Wharton, blandly.
The lad coloured hotly, then bethought himself—radiant:—
"I left Eton last half, as of course you know quite well. But if it had only been last Christmas instead of this, wouldn't I have scored—by Jove! They gave us a beastly essay instead of a book. Demagogues!' I sat up all night, and screwed out a page and a half. I'd have known something about it now."
And as he stood beside the tea-table, waiting for Marcella to entrust some tea to him for distribution, he turned and made a profound bow to his candidate cousin.
Everybody joined in the laugh, led by Wharton. Then there was a general drawing up of chairs, and Marcella applied herself to making tea, helped by Aldous. Wharton alone remained standing before the fire, observant and apart.
Hallin, whose health at this moment made all exertion, even a drive, something of a burden, sat a little away from the tea-table, resting, and glad to be silent. Yet all the time he was observing the girl presiding and the man beside her—his friend, her lover. The moment had a peculiar, perhaps a melancholy interest for him. So close had been the bond between himself and Aldous, that the lover's communication of his engagement had evoked in the friend that sense—poignant, inevitable—which in the realm of the affections always waits on something done and finished,—a leaf turned, a chapter closed. "That sad word, Joy!" Hallin was alone and ill when Raeburn's letter reached him, and through the following day and night he was haunted by Landor's phrase, long familiar and significant to him. His letter to his friend, and the letter to Miss Boyce for which Raeburn had asked him, had cost him an invalid's contribution of sleep and ease. The girl's answer had seemed to him constrained and young, though touched here and there with a certain fineness and largeness of phrase, which, if it was to be taken as an index of character, no doubt threw light upon the matter so far as Aldous was concerned.
Her beauty, of which he had heard much, now that he was face to face with it, was certainly striking enough—all the more because of its immaturity, the subtlety and uncertainty of its promise. Immaturity—uncertainty—these words returned upon him as he observed her manner with its occasional awkwardness, the awkwardness which goes with power not yet fully explored or mastered by its possessor. How Aldous hung upon her, following every movement, anticipating every want! After a while Hallin found himself half-inclined to Mr. Boyce's view, that men of Raeburn's type are never seen to advantage in this stage—this queer topsy-turvy stage—of first passion. He felt a certain impatience, a certain jealousy for his friend's dignity. It seemed to him too, every now and then, that she—the girl—was teased by all this absorption, this deference. He was conscious of watching for something in her that did not appear; and a first prescience of things anxious or untoward stirred in his quick sense.
"You may all say what you like," said Marcella, suddenly, putting down her cup, and letting her hand drop for emphasis on her knee; "but you will never persuade me that game-preserving doesn't make life in the country much more difficult, and the difference between classes much wider and bitterer, than they need be."
The remark cut across some rattling talk of Frank Leven's, who was in the first flush of the sportsman's ardour, and, though by no means without parts, could at the present moment apply his mind to little else than killing of one kind or another, unless it were to the chances of keeping his odious cousin out of Parliament.
Leven stared. Miss Boyce's speech seemed to him to have no sort of à propos. Aldous looked down upon her as he stood beside her, smiling.
"I wish you didn't trouble yourself so much about it," he said.
"How can I help it?" she answered quickly; and then flushed, like one who has drawn attention indiscreetly to their own personal situation.
"Trouble herself!" echoed young Leven. "Now, look here Miss Boyce, will you come for a walk with me? I'll convince you, as I convinced those fellows over there. I know I could, and you won't give me the chance; it's too bad."
"Oh, you!" she said, with a little shrug; "what do you know about it? One might as well consult a gambler about gambling when he is in the middle of his first rush of luck. I have ten times more right to an opinion than you have. I can keep my head cool, and notice a hundred things that you would never see. I come fresh into your country life, and the first thing that strikes me is that the whole machinery of law and order seems to exist for nothing in the world but to protect your pheasants! There are policemen—to catch poachers; there are magistrates—to try them. To judge from the newspapers, at least, they have nothing else to do. And if you follow your sporting instincts, you are a very fine fellow, and everybody admires you. But if a shoemaker's son in Mellor follows his, he is a villain and a thief, and the policeman and the magistrate make for him at once."
"But I don't steal his chickens!" cried the lad, choking with arguments and exasperation; "and why should he steal my pheasants? I paid for the eggs, I paid for the hens to sit on 'em, I paid for the coops to rear them in, I paid the men to watch them, I paid for the barley to feed them with: why is he to be allowed to take my property, and I am to be sent to jail if I take his?"
"Property!" said Marcella, scornfully. "You can't settle everything nowadays by that big word. We are coming to put the public good before property. If the nation should decide to curtail your 'right,' as you call it, in the general interest, it will do it, and you will be left to scream."
She had flung her arm round the back of her chair, and all her lithe young frame was tense with an eagerness, nay, an excitement, which drew Hallin's attention. It was more than was warranted by the conversation, he thought.
"Well, if you think the abolition of game preserving would be popular in the country, Miss Boyce, I'm certain you make a precious mistake," cried Leven. "Why, even you don't think it would be, do you, Mr. Hallin?" he said, appealing at random in his disgust.
"I don't know," said Hallin, with his quiet smile. "I rather think, on the whole, it would be. The farmers put up with it, but a great many of them don't like it. Things are mended since the Ground Game Act, but there are a good many grievances still left."
"I should think there are!" said Marcella, eagerly, bending forward to him. "I was talking to one of our farmers the other day whose land goes up to the edge of Lord Winterbourne's woods. 'They don't keep their pheasants, miss,' he said. 'I do. I and my corn. If I didn't send a man up half-past five in the morning, when the ears begin to fill, there'd be nothing left for us.' 'Why don't you complain to the agent?' I said. 'Complain! Lor' bless you, miss, you may complain till you're black in the face. I've allus found—an' I've been here, man and boy, thirty-two year—as how Winterbournes generally best it.' There you have the whole thing in a nutshell. It's a tyranny—a tyranny of the rich."
Flushed and sarcastic, she looked at Frank Leven; but Hallin had an uncomfortable feeling that the sarcasm was not all meant for him. Aldous was sitting with his hands on his knees, and his head bent forward a little. Once, as the talk ran on, Hallin saw him raise his grey eyes to the girl beside him, who certainly did not notice it, and was not thinking of him. There was a curious pain and perplexity in the expression, but something else too—a hunger, a dependence, a yearning, that for an instant gripped the friend's heart.
"Well, I know Aldous doesn't agree with you, Miss Boyce," cried Leven, looking about him in his indignation for some argument that should be final. "You don't, do you, Aldous? You don't think the country would be the better, if we could do away with game to-morrow?"
"No more than I think it would be the better," said Aldous, quietly, "if we could do away with gold-plate and false hair to-morrow. There would be too many hungry goldsmiths and wig-makers on the streets."
Marcella turned to him, half defiant, half softened.
"Of course, your point lies in to-morrow," she said. "I accept that. We can't carry reform by starving innocent people. But the question is, what are we to work towards? Mayn't we regard the game laws as one of the obvious crying abuses to be attacked first—in the great campaign!—the campaign which is to bring liberty and self-respect back to the country districts, and make the labourer feel himself as much of a man as the squire?"
"What a head! What an attitude!" thought Hallin, half repelled, half fascinated. "But a girl that can talk politics—hostile politics—to her lover, and mean them too—or am I inexperienced?—and is it merely that she is so much interested in him that she wants to be quarrelling with him?"
Aldous looked up. "I am not sure," he said, answering her. "That is always my difficulty, you know," and he smiled at her. "Game preserving is not to me personally an attractive form of private property, but it seems to me bound up with other forms, and I want to see where the attack is going to lead me. But I would protect your farmer—mind!—as zealously as you."
Hallin caught the impatient quiver of the girl's lip. The tea had just been taken away, and Marcella had gone to sit upon an old sofa near the fire, whither Aldous had followed her. Wharton, who had so far said nothing, had left his post of observation on the hearth-rug, and was sitting under the lamp balancing a paper-knife with great attention on two fingers. In the half light Hallin by chance saw a movement of Raeburn's hand towards Marcella's, which lay hidden among the folds of her dress—quick resistance on her part, then acquiescence. He felt a sudden pleasure in his friend's small triumph.
"Aldous and I have worn these things threadbare many a time," he said, addressing his hostess. "You don't know how kind he is to my dreams. I am no sportsman and have no landowning relations, so he ought to bid me hold my tongue. But he lets me rave. To me the simple fact is that game preserving creates crime. Agricultural life is naturally simpler—might be, it always seems to me, so much more easily moralised and fraternised than the industrial form. And you split it up and poison it all by the emphasis laid on this class pleasure. It is a natural pleasure, you say. Perhaps it is—the survival, perhaps, of some primitive instinct in our northern blood—but, if so, why should it be impossible for the rich to share it with the poor? I have little plans—dreams. I throw them out sometimes to catch Aldous, but he hardly rises to them!"
"Oh! I say," broke in Frank Leven, who could really bear it no longer. "Now look here, Miss Boyce,—what do you think Mr. Hallin wants? It is just sheer lunacy—it really is—though I know I'm impertinent, and he's a great man. But I do declare he wants Aldous to give up a big common there is—oh! over beyond Girtstone, down in the plain—on Lord Maxwell's estate, and make a labourers' shoot of it! Now, I ask you! And he vows he doesn't see why they shouldn't rear pheasants if they choose to club and pay for it. Well, I will say that much for him, Aldous didn't see his way to that, though he isn't the kind of Conservative I want to see in Parliament by a long way. Besides, it's such stuff! They say sport brutalises us, and then they want to go and contaminate the labourer. But we won't take the responsibility. We've got our own vices, and we'll stick to them; we're used to them; but we won't hand them on: we'd scorn the action."
The flushed young barbarian, driven to bay, was not to be resisted. Marcella laughed heartily, and Hallin laid an affectionate hand on the boy's shoulder, patting him as though he were a restive horse.
"Yes, I remember I was puzzled as to the details of Hallin's scheme," said Aldous, his mouth twitching. "I wanted to know who was to pay for the licences; how game enough for the number of applicants was to be got without preserving; and how men earning twelve or fourteen shillings a week were to pay a keeper. Then I asked a clergyman who has a living near this common what he thought would be the end of it. 'Well,' he said, 'the first day they'd shoot every animal on the place; the second day they'd shoot each other. Universal carnage—I should say that would be about the end of it.' These were trifles, of course—details."
Hallin shook his head serenely.
"I still maintain," he said, "that a little practical ingenuity might have found a way."
"And I will support you," said Wharton, laying down the paper-knife and bending over to Hallin, "with good reason. For three years and a few months just such an idea as you describe has been carried out on my own estate, and it has not worked badly at all."
"There!" cried Marcella. "There! I knew something could be done, if there was a will. I have always felt it."
She half turned to Aldous, then bent forward instead as though listening eagerly for what more Wharton might say, her face all alive, and eloquent.
"Of course, there was nothing to shoot!" exclaimed Frank Leven.
"On the contrary," said Wharton, smiling, "we are in the middle of a famous partridge country."
"How your neighbours must dote on you!" cried the boy. But Wharton took no notice.
"And my father preserved strictly," he went on. "It is quite a simple story. When I inherited, three years ago, I thought the whole thing detestable, and determined I wouldn't be responsible for keeping it up. So I called the estate together—farmers and labourers—and we worked out a plan. There are keepers, but they are the estate servants, not mine. Everybody has his turn according to the rules—I and my friends along with the rest. Not everybody can shoot every year, but everybody gets his chance, and, moreover, a certain percentage of all the game killed is public property, and is distributed every year according to a regular order."
"Who pays the keepers?" interrupted Leven.
"I do," said Wharton, smiling again. "Mayn't I—for the present—do what I will with mine own? I return in their wages some of my ill-gotten gains as a landowner. It is all makeshift, of course."
"I understand!" exclaimed Marcella, nodding to him—"you could not be a
Venturist and keep up game-preserving?"
Wharton met her bright eye with a half deprecating, reserved air.
"You are right, of course," he said drily. "For a Socialist to be letting his keepers run in a man earning twelve shillings a week for knocking over a rabbit would have been a little strong. No one can be consistent in my position—in any landowner's position—it is impossible; still, thank Heaven, one can deal with the most glaring matters. As Mr. Raeburn said, however, all this game business is, of course, a mere incident of the general land and property system, as you will hear me expound when you come to that meeting you promised me to honour."
He stooped forward, scanning her with smiling deference. Marcella felt the man's hand that held her own suddenly tighten an instant. Then Aldous released her, and rising walked towards the fire.
"You're not going to one of his meetings, Miss Boyce!" cried Frank, in angry incredulity.
Marcella hesitated an instant, half angry with Wharton. Then she reddened and threw back her dark head with the passionate gesture Hallin had already noticed as characteristic.
"Mayn't I go where I belong?" she said—"where my convictions lead me?"
There was a moment's awkward silence. Then Hallin got up.
"Miss Boyce, may we see the house? Aldous has told me much of it."
* * * * *
Presently, in the midst of their straggling progress through the half-furnished rooms of the garden front, preceded by the shy footman carrying a lamp, which served for little more than to make darkness visible, Marcella found herself left behind with Aldous. As soon as she felt that they were alone, she realised a jar between herself and him. His manner was much as usual, but there was an underlying effort and difficulty which her sensitiveness caught at once. A sudden wave of girlish trouble—remorse—swept over her. In her impulsiveness she moved close to him as they were passing through her mother's little sitting-room, and put her hand on his arm.
"I don't think I was nice just now," she said, stammering. "I didn't mean it. I seem to be always driven into opposition—into a feeling of war—when you are so good to me—so much too good to me!"
Aldous had turned at her first word. With a long breath, as it were of unspeakable relief, he caught her in his arms vehemently, passionately. So far she had been very shrinking and maidenly with him in their solitary moments, and he had been all delicate chivalry and respect, tasting to the full the exquisiteness of each fresh advance towards intimacy, towards lover's privilege, adoring her, perhaps, all the more for her reserve, her sudden flights, and stiffenings. But to-night he asked no leave, and in her astonishment she was almost passive.
"Oh, do let me go!" she cried at last, trying to disengage herself completely.
"No!" he said with emphasis, still holding her hand firmly. "Come and sit down here. They will look after themselves."
He put her, whether she would or no, into an arm-chair and knelt beside her.
"Did you think it was hardly kind," he said with a quiver of voice he could not repress, "to let me hear for the first time, in public, that you had promised to go to one of that man's meetings after refusing again and again to come to any of mine?"
"Do you want to forbid me to go?" she said quickly. There was a feeling in her which would have been almost relieved, for the moment, if he had said yes.
"By no means," he said steadily. "That was not our compact. But—guess for yourself what I want! Do you think"—he paused a moment—"do you think I put nothing of myself into my public life—into these meetings among the people who have known me from a boy? Do you think it is all a convention—that my feeling, my conscience, remain outside? You can't think that! But if not, how can I bear to live what is to be so large a part of my life out of your ken and sight? I know—I know—you warned me amply—you can't agree with me. But there is much besides intellectual agreement possible—much that would help and teach us both—if only we are together—not separated—not holding aloof—"
He stopped, watching all the changes of her face. She was gulfed in a deep wave of half-repentant feeling, remembering all his generosity, his forbearance, his devotion.
"When are you speaking next?" she half whispered. In the dim light her softened pose, the gentle sudden relaxation of every line, were an intoxication.
"Next week—Friday—at Gairsly. Hallin and Aunt Neta are coming."
"Will Miss Raeburn take me?"
His grey eyes shone upon her, and he kissed her hand.
"Mr. Hallin won't speak for you!" she said, after the silence, with a return of mischief.
"Don't be so sure! He has given me untold help in the drafting of my Bill. If I didn't call myself a Conservative, he would vote for me to-morrow. That's the absurdity of it. Do you know, I hear them coming back?"
"One thing," she said hastily, drawing him towards her, and then holding him back, as though shrinking always from the feeling she could so readily evoke. "I must say it; you oughtn't to give me so much money, it is too much. Suppose I use it for things you don't like?"
"You won't," he said gaily.
She tried to push the subject further, but he would not have it.
"I am all for free discussion," he said in the same tone; "but sometimes debate must be stifled. I am going to stifle it!"
And stooping, he kissed her, lightly, tremulously. His manner showed her once more what she was to him—how sacred, how beloved. First it touched and shook her; then she sprang up with a sudden disagreeable sense of moral disadvantage—inferiority—coming she knew not whence, and undoing for the moment all that buoyant consciousness of playing the magnanimous, disinterested part which had possessed her throughout the talk in the drawing-room.
The others reappeared, headed by their lamp: Wharton first, scanning the two who had lingered behind, with his curious eyes, so blue and brilliant under the white forehead and the curls.
"We have been making the wildest shots at your ancestors, Miss Boyce," he said. "Frank professed to know everything about the pictures, and turned out to know nothing. I shall ask for some special coaching to-morrow morning. May I engage you—ten o'clock?"
Marcella made some evasive answer, and they all sauntered back to the drawing-room.
"Shall you be at work to-morrow, Raeburn?" said Wharton.
"Probably," said Aldous drily. Marcella, struck by the tone, looked back, and caught an expression and bearing which were as yet new to her in the speaker. She supposed they represented the haughtiness natural in the man of birth and power towards the intruder, who is also the opponent.
Instantly the combative critical mood returned upon her, and the impulse to assert herself by protecting Wharton. His manner throughout the talk in the drawing-room had been, she declared to herself, excellent—modest, and self-restrained, comparing curiously with the boyish egotism and self-abandonment he had shown in their tête-à-tête.
* * * * *
"Why, there is Mr. Boyce," exclaimed Wharton, hurrying forward as they entered the drawing-room.
There, indeed, on the sofa was the master of the house, more ghastly black and white than ever, and prepared to claim to the utmost the tragic pre-eminence of illness. He shook hands coldly with Aldous, who asked after his health with the kindly brevity natural to the man who wants no effusions for himself in public or personal matters, and concludes therefore that other people desire none.
"You are better, papa?" said Marcella, taking his hand.
"Certainly, my dear—better for morphia. Don't talk of me. I have got my death warrant, but I hope I can take it quietly. Evelyn, I specially asked to have that thin cushion brought down from my dressing-room. It is strange that no one pays any attention to my wants."
Mrs. Boyce, almost as white, Marcella now saw, as her husband, moved forward from the fire, where she had been speaking to Hallin, took a cushion from a chair near, exactly similar to the one he missed, and changed his position a little.
"It is just the feather's weight of change that makes the difference, isn't it?" said Wharton, softly, sitting down beside the invalid.
Mr. Boyce turned a mollified countenance upon the speaker, and being now free from pain, gave himself up to the amusement of hearing his guest talk. Wharton devoted himself, employing all his best arts.
"Dr. Clarke is not anxious about him," Mrs. Boyce said in a low voice to Marcella as they moved away. "He does not think the attack will return for a long while, and he has given me the means of stopping it if it does come back."
"How tired you look!" said Aldous, coming up to them, and speaking in the same undertone. "Will you not let Marcella take you to rest?"
He was always deeply, unreasonably touched by any sign of stoicism, of defied suffering in women. Mrs. Boyce had proved it many times already. On the present occasion she put his sympathy by, but she lingered to talk with him. Hallin from a distance noticed first of all her tall thinness and fairness, and her wonderful dignity of carriage; then the cordiality of her manner to her future son-in-law. Marcella stood by listening, her young shoulders somewhat stiffly set. Her consciousness of her mother's respect and admiration for the man she was to marry was, oddly enough, never altogether pleasant to her. It brought with it a certain discomfort, a certain wish to argue things out.
Hallin and Aldous parted with Frank Leven at Mellor gate, and turned homeward together under a starry heaven already whitening to the coming moon.
"Do you know that man Wharton is getting an extraordinary hold upon the London working men?" said Hallin. "I have heard him tell that story of the game-preserving before. He was speaking for one of the Radical candidates at Hackney, and I happened to be there. It brought down the house. The rôle of your Socialist aristocrat, of your land-nationalising landlord, is a very telling one."
"And comparatively easy," said Aldous, "when you know that neither
Socialism nor land-nationalisation will come in your time!"
"Oh! so you think him altogether a windbag?"
Aldous hesitated and laughed.
"I have certainly no reason to suspect him of principles. His conscience as a boy was of pretty elastic stuff."
"You may be unfair to him," said Hallin, quickly. Then, after a pause:
"How long is he staying at Mellor?"
"About a week, I believe," said Aldous, shortly. "Mr. Boyce has taken a fancy to him."
They walked on in silence, and then Aldous turned to his friend in distress.
"You know, Hallin, this wind is much too cold for you. You are the most wilful of men. Why would you walk?"
"Hold your tongue, sir, and listen to me. I think your Marcella is beautiful, and as interesting as she is beautiful. There!"
Aldous started, then turned a grateful face upon him.
"You must get to know her well," he said, but with some constraint.
"Of course. I wonder," said Hallin, musing, "whom she has got hold of among the Venturists. Shall you persuade her to come out of that, do you think, Aldous?"
"No!" said Raeburn, cheerfully. "Her sympathies and convictions go with them."
Then, as they passed through the village, he began to talk of quite other things—college friends, a recent volume of philosophical essays, and so on. Hallin, accustomed and jealously accustomed as he was to be the one person in the world with whom Raeburn talked freely, would not to-night have done or said anything to force a strong man's reserve. But his own mind was full of anxiety.