* * * * *
If Mrs. Jellison had this small belief in the powers of the new mistress of Mellor over matters which, according to her, had been settled generations ago by "the Lord and natur'," Marcella certainly was in no mood to contradict her. She walked through the village on her return scanning everything about her—the slatternly girls plaiting on the doorsteps, the children in the lane, the loungers round the various "publics," the labourers, old and young, who touched their caps to her—with a moody and passionate eye.
"Mary!" she broke out as they neared the Rectory, "I shall be twenty-four directly. How much harm do you think I shall have done here by the time I am sixty-four?"
Mary laughed at her, and tried to cheer her. But Marcella was in the depths of self-disgust.
"What is wanted, really wanted," she said with intensity, "is not my help, but their growth. How can I make them take for themselves—take, roughly and selfishly even, if they will only take! As for my giving, what relation has it to anything real or lasting?"
Mary was scandalised.
"I declare you are as bad as Mr. Craven," she said. "He told Charles yesterday that the curtseys of the old women in the village to him and Charles—women old enough to be their grandmothers—sickened him of the whole place, and that he should regard it as the chief object of his work here to make such things impossible in the future. Or perhaps you're still of Mr.—Mr. Wharton's opinion—you'll be expecting Charles and me to give up charity. But it's no good, my dear. We're not 'advanced,' and we never shall be."
At the mention of Wharton Marcella threw her proud head back; wave after wave of changing expression passed over the face.
"I often remember the things Mr. Wharton said in this village," she said at last. "There was life and salt and power in many of them. It's not what he said, but what he was, that one wants to forget."
They parted presently, and Marcella went heavily home. The rising of the spring, the breath of the April air, had never yet been sad and oppressive to her as they were to-day.