"Only half the income?" he repeated. "Ah!"—he smiled kindly—"is that an arrangement between you and your mother?"
Marcella let her hand fall with a little despairing gesture.
"Oh no!" she said—"oh no! Mamma—mamma will take nothing from me or from the estate. She has her own money, and she will live with me part of the year."
The intonation in the words touched Aldous profoundly.
"Part of the year?" he said, astonished, yet not knowing how to question her. "Mrs. Boyce will not make Mellor her home?"
"She would be thankful if she had never seen it," said Marcella, quickly—"and she would never see it again if it weren't for me. It's dreadful what she went through last year, when—when I was in London."
Her voice fell. Glancing up at him involuntarily, her eye looked with dread for some chill, some stiffening in him. Probably he condemned her, had always condemned her for deserting her home and her parents. But instead she saw nothing but sympathy.
"Mrs. Boyce has had a hard life," he said, with grave feeling.
Marcella felt a tear leap, and furtively raised her handkerchief to brush it away. Then, with a natural selfishness, her quick thought took another turn. A wild yearning rose in her mind to tell him much more than she had ever done in old days of the miserable home-circumstances of her early youth; to lay stress on the mean unhappiness which had depressed her own child-nature whenever she was with her parents, and had withered her mother's character. Secretly, passionately, she often made the past an excuse. Excuse for what? For the lack of delicacy and loyalty, of the best sort of breeding, which had marked the days of her engagement?
Never—never to speak of it with him!—to pour out everything—to ask him to judge, to understand, to forgive!—