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"We are all going together to the Gairsley meeting next week, aren't we? I am so glad you are coming. Aldous will do his best." There was something very winning in his tone to her. It implied both his old and peculiar friendship for Aldous, and his eager wish to find a new friend in her to adopt her into their comradeship.
Please come at once." She arrived at Mellor late that same night. On the same day Lord Maxwell died. Less than a week later he was buried in the little Gairsley church. Mr. Boyce was then alarmingly ill, and Marcella sat in his darkened room or in her own all day, thinking from time to time of what was passing three miles away of the great house in its mourning of the figures round the grave.
Then, pulling himself together with a strong hand, he left the subject and began to talk of her straw-plaiting scheme, of the Gairsley meeting, and of Hallin. But in the middle Marcella unexpectedly said: "I wish you would tell me, seriously, what reasons you have for not liking Mr. Wharton? other than politics, I mean?" Her black eyes fixed him with a keen insistence.
The little scene when Aldous had given her the pearls, returned so long ago why! she could see the fire blazing in the Stone Parlour, feel his arm about her! the drive home after the Gairsley meeting that poignant moment in his sitting-room the night of the ball his face, his anxious, tender face, as she came down the wide stairs of the Court towards him on that terrible evening when she pleaded with him and his grandfather in vain: had these things, incidents, relations, been ever a real part of the living world?
Marcella disciplined herself before the Gairsley meeting, and went thither resolved to give Aldous as much sympathy as she could. But the performance only repelled a mind over which Wharton was every day gaining more influence.
In reality Gairsley represented a corner of the estate which Aldous had specially made his own. He had spent much labour and thought on the improvement of what had been a backward district, and in particular he had tried a small profit-sharing experiment upon a farm there which he had taken into his own hands for the purpose.
I came once to see how she did it, but I found her and the Gairsley ironmonger measuring the ears of the Holbeins it seems you can't know anything about pictures now unless you have measured all the ears and the little fingers, which I hope you know; I didn't! so I fled, as she hadn't a word to throw to me, even as one of the public.
But all the same, in this poaching matter, he must have, his way, and she must just get used to it. Ah! a low whistle from the further side of the wood. He replied, and was almost instantly joined by a tall slouching youth, by day a blacksmith's apprentice at Gairsley, the Maxwells' village, who had often brought him information before. The two sat talking for ten minutes or so on the log.
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