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A few minutes later the husband and wife were in conference together, Marcella sitting, Maxwell standing beside her. Marcella's tears had ceased; but never had Maxwell seen her so overwhelmed, so sad, and he felt half ashamed of his own burning irritation and annoyance with the whole matter. Clearly, what he had dimly foreseen on the night of her return from the Mile End meeting had happened.
"I don't want any of their precious society," he said irritably. "They should have done their calling long ago. There's no grace in it now; I don't know that one isn't inclined to think it an intrusion." But the women were silent. Marcella's attention was diverted from her mother to the father's small dark head and thin face.
Miss Eubanks had made sure that the ladies wore their white ribbons. Marcella's own satin bow was larger than common, so that no one might mistake the principles of the heart beating beneath it. But the cool big bowl with its harmless fruit restored confidence at once, and when Miss Caroline urged them to try Clem's punch they refrained not.
It did not awaken my father; and we lay trembling with anxiety. In a minute afterwards we saw our mother-in-law enter the cottage her dress was bloody. I put my hand to Marcella's mouth to prevent her crying out, although I was myself in great alarm. Our mother-in-law approached my father's bed, looked to see if he was asleep, and then went to the chimney and blew up the embers into a blaze.
Marcella's eyes closed; she was not asleep, she was thinking very vividly of Louis, but all the murmur of sounds about her intruded on her consciousness, making clear thought impossible.
There had been compensations all through and were not the great passion of her Solesby days, together with the interest and novelty of her London experience, enough to give zest and glow to the whole retrospect? Ah! but it will be observed that in this sketch of Marcella's schooldays nothing has been said of Marcella's holidays.
Hence the card's seclusion in Marcella's boudoir. Hence, likewise, Marcella's subsequent preference, in her temperance propaganda, for straightforward means which no gentleman could affect to misunderstand. She relied chiefly thereafter upon some highly colored charts depicting the interior of the human stomach in varying stages of alcoholic degeneration.
Marcella's manners were certainly rough; it was difficult to say what she was learning, or with whom she was associating; accomplishments she appeared to have none. Something should certainly be done for her considering the family contingencies. But being a strong evangelical, the aunt stipulated for "religious influences," and said she would write to a friend.
He bade her good-bye and went without a word of kindliness, of hope. Louis took him to Cook's Wall. When he came back he said nothing in answer to all Marcella's enquiries about what they had said on the long drive. Louis went back to the gorse-grubbing and worked feverishly for almost a month, as he always did after being drunk.
She had dragged her cabin trunk into the doorway, and laid upon it the tin in which her cake was packed, the two cups he brought with him and the teapot. "A beneficent shipping company provides one camp stool to each cabin, you'll find if you're lucky," he said; but there was not one in Marcella's cabin.
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