"No!—why should we?" he repeated, sighing. "Why are we here at all?—that is what I have been asking myself all the evening. And now more than ever since my walk with that boy Ancoats."
"Tell me about it," she said eagerly. "Could you get nothing out of him?"
Maxwell shrugged his shoulders.
"Nothing. He vows that everything is all right; that he knows a pack of slanderers have been 'yelping at him,' and he wishes both they and his mother would let him alone."
"His mother!" cried Marcella, outraged.
"Well, I suppose I said to him the kind of thing you would evidently like to say. But with no result. He merely laughed, and chattered about everything under the sun—his race-horses, new plays, politics—Heaven knows what! He is in an excited state—feverish, restless, and, I should think, unhappy. But he would tell nothing—to me."
"How much do you think she knows?"
"His mother? Nothing, I should say. Every now and then I detect a note of extra anxiety when she talks to him; and there is evidently something in her mind, some impression from his manner, perhaps, which is driving her more keenly than ever towards this marriage. But I don't believe a single one of the stories that have reached us has reached her. And now—here is this poor girl—and even my dull eyes have noticed that to-night he has purposely, markedly, avoided her."
Marcella felt her cheek flame.
"And when one thinks of his behaviour in the winter!" she cried.