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Politics is one thing slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point. He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their ways.
Hallin was at intervals slightly delirious, but less so than the night before; and in the early morning the young doctor, who had sat up with him, reported him to Aldous as calmer and a little stronger. But the heart mischief was hopeless, and might bring the bruised life to an end at any moment.
Miss Hallin could not write, and Mr. Craven, I was to tell you, had been ill for a week with a chill. You haven't then seen any account of the lecture in the papers?" "No; I have looked yesterday and to-day in our paper, but there was nothing " "Some of the Radical papers reported it. I hoped you might have seen it.
But then came Cambridge, the flow of a new mental life, his friendship for Edward Hallin, and the beginnings of a moral storm and stress. When he and the cousin next met, he was quite cold to her. She seemed to him a pretty piece of millinery, endowed with a trick of parrot phrases.
"Oh! children are so much happier when they are dirty," said Letty, graciously, pleased to feel herself on these easy terms with her two companions. "What beautiful flowers he has! and what an astonishing little botanist he seems to be!" And she seated herself beside Hallin, using all her blandishments to make friends with him, which, however, did not prove to be an easy matter.
But something checked both, and in a final offering of the soul, Hallin gave up his last desire. What Aldous saw was only that the dying man opened his hand as though it asked for that of his friend. He placed his own within those seeking fingers, and Hallin's latest movement which death stopped half-way was to raise it to his lips.
More than this: did not the ultimate explanation of the whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed it? The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and distorted; none the less, reality wins the day. So Hallin read it.
And she got up with her flashing smile half love, half fun and crossed the room to summon her little boy, Hallin, for his evening play. Maxwell looked after her, not heeding at all what she was saying, heeding only herself, her voice, the atmosphere of charm and life she carried with her. Marcella Maxwell, however, had not been easily wooed by the man who now filled all the horizon of her life.
On the table before him stood a photograph of Hallin, besides a miniature of his mother as a girl. He had drawn the miniature closer to him, finding sympathy and joy in its youth, in the bright expectancy of the eyes, and so wrote, as it were, having both her and his friend in mind and sight.
Hallin had accepted the invitation with eagerness, and was throwing an intensity of labour into the writing of his three lectures which often seemed to his poor sister to be not only utterly beyond his physical strength, but to carry with it a note as of a last effort, a farewell message, such as her devoted affection could ill endure.
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