Marcella lifted it again, and began listlessly to go through it.
"Mamma!" she said presently, looking up, the colour flushing back into her face, "I find no mention of you in it throughout. There seems to be no provision for you."
"There is none," said Mrs. Boyce, quietly. "There was no need. I have my own income. We lived upon it for years before your father succeeded to Mellor. It is therefore amply sufficient for me now."
"You cannot imagine," cried Marcella, trembling in every limb, "that I am going to take the whole of my father's estate, and leave nothing—nothing for his wife. It would be impossible—unseemly. It would be to do me an injustice, mamma, as well as yourself," she added proudly.
"No, I think not," said Mrs. Boyce, with her usual cold absence of emotion. "You do not yet understand the situation. Your father's misfortunes nearly ruined the estate for a time. Your grandfather went through great trouble, and raised large sums to—" she paused for the right phrase—"to free us from the consequences of your father's actions. I benefited, of course, as much as he did. Those sums crippled all your grandfather's old age. He was a man to whom I was attached—whom I respected. Mellor, I believe, had never been embarrassed before. Well, your uncle did a little towards recovery—but on the whole he was a fool. Your father has done much more, and you, no doubt, will complete it. As for me, I have no claim to anything more from Mellor. The place itself is"—again she stopped for a word of which the energy, when it came, seemed to escape her—"hateful to me. I shall feel freer if I have no tie to it. And at last I persuaded your father to let me have my way."
Marcella rose from her seat impetuously, walked quickly across the room, and threw herself on her knees beside her mother.
"Mamma, are you still determined—now that we two are alone in the world—to act towards me, to treat me as though I were not your daughter—not your child at all, but a stranger?"
It was a cry of anguish. A sudden slight tremor swept over Mrs. Boyce's thin and withered face. She braced herself to the inevitable.
"Don't let us make a tragedy of it, my dear," she said, with a light touch on Marcella's hands. "Let us discuss it reasonably. Won't you sit down? I am not proposing anything very dreadful. But, like you, I have some interests of my own, and I should be glad to follow them—now—a little. I wish to spend some of the year in London; to make that, perhaps, my headquarters, so as to see something of some old friends whom I have had no intercourse with for years—perhaps also of my relations." She spoke of them with a particular dryness. "And I should be glad—after this long time—to be somewhat taken out of oneself, to read, to hear what is going on, to feed one's mind a little."
Marcella, looking at her, saw a kind of feverish light, a sparkling intensity in the pale blue eyes, that filled her with amazement. What, after all, did she know of this strange individuality from which her own being had taken its rise? The same flesh and blood—what an irony of nature!