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Boyce," cried Lord Maxwell, meeting them on the steps of the inner quadrangular corridor "Welcome indeed! Let me take you in. Marcella! with Aldous's permission!" he stooped his white head gallantly and kissed her on the cheek "Remember I am an old man; if I choose to pay you compliments, you will have to put up with them!" Then he offered Mrs.
Marcella passed along on Aldous's arm, conscious that people were streaming into the corridor from all the rooms opening upon it, and that every eye was fixed upon her and her mother. "Look, there she is," she heard in an excited girl's voice as they passed Lord Maxwell's library, now abandoned to the crowd like all the rest. "Come, quick! There I told you she was lovely!"
Mary shyly stole a look at him from time to time. "Well," he said at last, stooping to his neighbour, "what are you thinking of?" "I think she is a dream!" said Mary, flushing with the pleasure of being able to say it. They were great friends, he and she, and to-night somehow she was not a bit afraid of him. Aldous's eye sparkled a moment; then he looked down at her with a kind smile.
She had felt herself of no account before, intellectually, in Aldous's company, as we know. But then how involuntary on his part, and how counter-balanced by that passionate idealism of his love, which glorified every pretty impulse in her to the noblest proportions!
But the assumptions on which, as she told herself rebelliously, it all went that the rich and the educated must rule, and the poor obey; that existing classes and rights, the forces of individualism and competition, must and would go on pretty much as they were; that great houses and great people, the English land and game system, and all the rest of our odious class paraphernalia were in the order of the universe; these ideas, conceived as the furniture of Aldous's mind, threw her again into a ferment of passionate opposition.
A man, he thought, might be much better employed than in doing either. Above the mantelpiece was his mother's picture the picture of a young woman in a low dress and muslin scarf, trivial and empty in point of art, yet linked in Aldous's mind with a hundred touching recollections, buried all of them in the silence of an unbroken reserve.
He realised more vividly than before the rare, exciting elements of her beauty, and the truth in Aldous's comparison of her to one of the tall women in a Florentine fresco. But he felt himself a good deal baffled by her, all the same.
I shall always feel sorry for Aldous's wife that she did not know him at college." A shock went through Marcella at the word that tremendous word wife. As Hallin said it, there was something intolerable in the claim it made! "I should like you to tell me," she said faintly. Then she added, with more energy and a sudden advance of friendliness, "But you really must come in and rest.
At any rate, he was prodigiously tickled by the whole position. A step, a rustle outside he hastily shut his book and listened. The door opened, and Marcella came in a white vision against the heavy blue of the walls. With her came, too, a sudden strong scent of flowers, for she carried a marvellous bunch of hot-house roses, Aldous's gift, which had just arrived by special messenger.
He could not, however, be kept in bed, owing to restlessness and difficulty of breathing, and by midday he was in Aldous's sitting-room, drawn close to the window, that he might delight his eyes with the wide range of wood and plain that it commanded. After a very wet September, the October days were now following each other in a settled and sunny peace.
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