"Did he give you no warning in that talk you had with him at Mellor?" said Mrs. Boyce, after a minute's silence.
"Not the least," said Marcella, rising restlessly and beginning to walk up and down. "He spoke to me about wishing to bring it on again—asked me to let him write. I told him it was all done with—for ever! As to my own feelings, I felt it was no use to speak of them; but I thought—I believed, I had proved to him that Lord Maxwell had absolutely given up all idea of such a thing; and that it was already probable he would marry some one else. I told him I would rather disappear from every one I knew than consent to it—he could only humiliate us all by saying a word. And now, after that!—"
She stopped in her restless walk, pressing her hands miserably together.
"What does he want with us and our affairs?" she broke out. "He wishes, of course, to have no more to do with me. And now we force him—force him into these intimate relations. What can papa have said in that letter to him? What can he have said? Oh! it is unbearable! Can't we write at once?"
She pressed her hands over her eyes in a passion of humiliation and disgust. Mrs. Boyce watched her closely.
"We must wait, anyway, for his letter," she said. "It ought to be here by to-morrow morning."
Marcella sank on a chair by an open glass door, her eyes wandering, through the straggling roses growing against the wall of the stone balcony outside, to the laughing purples and greens of the sea.
"Of course," she said unhappily, "it is most probable he will consent. It would not be like him to refuse. But, mamma, you must write. I must write and beg him not to do it. It is quite simple. We can manage everything for ourselves. Oh! how could papa?" she broke out again in a low wail, "how could he?"
Mrs. Boyce's lips tightened sharply. It seemed to her a foolish question. She, at least, had had the experience of twenty years out of which to answer it. Death had made no difference. She saw her husband's character and her own seared and broken life with the same tragical clearness; she felt the same gnawing of an affection not to be plucked out while the heart still beat. This act of indelicacy and injustice was like many that had gone before it; and there was in it the same evasion and concealment towards herself. No matter. She had made her account with it all twenty years before. What astonished her was, that the force of her strong coercing will had been able to keep him for so long within the limits of the smaller and meaner immoralities of this world.
"Have you read the rest of the will?" she asked, after a long pause.