“The mists ­and the sun ­and the first streaks of yellow in the beeches ­beautiful! ­beautiful!”

And with a long breath of delight Marcella Boyce threw herself on her knees by the window she had just opened, and, propping her face upon her hands, devoured the scene, before her with that passionate intensity of pleasure which had been her gift and heritage through life.

She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees ­some Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two ­groups where the slow selective hand of time had been at work for generations, developing here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing black against the sky.  Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last in a far distant gap where a gate ­and a gate of some importance ­clearly should have been, yet was not.  The size of the trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried with them a confused general impression of well-being and of dignity.  Marcella drew it in ­this impression ­with avidity.  Yet at the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.

“It is a heavenly place, all said and done,” she protested to herself with a little frown.  “But no doubt it would have been better still if Uncle Robert had looked after it and we could afford to keep the garden decent.  Still ­”

She dropped on a stool beside the open window, and as her eyes steeped themselves afresh in what they saw, the frown disappeared again in the former look of glowing content ­that content of youth which is never merely passive, nay, rather, contains an invariable element of covetous eagerness.

It was but three months or so since Marcella’s father, Mr. Richard Boyce, had succeeded to the ownership of Mellor Park the old home of the Boyces, and it was little more than six weeks since Marcella had received her summons home from the students’ boarding-house in Kensington, where she had been lately living.  She had ardently wished to assist in the June “settling-in,” having not been able to apply her mind to the music or painting she was supposed to be studying, nor indeed to any other subject whatever, since the news of their inheritance had reached her.  But her mother in a dry little note had let it be known that she preferred to manage the move for herself.  Marcella had better go on with her studies as long as possible.

Yet Marcella was here at last.  And as she looked round her large bare room, with its old dilapidated furniture, and then out again to woods and lawns, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out ­atoned for by this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so deplorably! ­since no one could have reasonably expected that an apparently sound man of sixty would have succumbed in three days to the sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted successfully a score of times before.

Her great desire now was to put the past ­the greater part of it at any rate ­behind her altogether.  Its shabby worries were surely done with, poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present position.  At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl, paid for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket-money, and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or fancied slur; she was no longer even the half-Bohemian student of these past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity of keeping her boarding-house expenses down to the lowest possible figure would allow.  She was something altogether different.  She was Marcella Boyce, a “finished” and grown-up young woman of twenty-one, the only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mellor Park, inheritress of one of the most ancient names in Midland England, and just entering on a life which to her own fancy and will, at any rate, promised the highest possible degree of interest and novelty.

Yet, in the very act of putting her past away from her, she only succeeded, so it seemed, in inviting it to repossess her.

For against her will, she fell straightway ­in this quiet of the autumn morning ­into a riot of memory, setting her past self against her present more consciously than she had done yet, recalling scene after scene and stage after stage with feelings of sarcasm, or amusement, or disgust, which showed themselves freely as they came and went, in the fine plastic face turned to the September woods.

She had been at school since she was nine years old ­there was the dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which, in her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so impatiently to forget.  As to the time before her school life, she had a dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, of a house in London, of a large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice of her, of games, little friends, and birthday parties.  What had led to the complete disappearance of this earliest “set,” to use a theatrical phrase, from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet adequately know, though she had some theories and many suspicions in the background of her mind.  But at any rate this first image of memory was succeeded by another precise as the first was vague ­the image of a tall white house, set against a white chalk cliff rising in terraces behind it and alongside it, where she had spent the years from nine to fourteen, and where, if she were set down blindfold, now, at twenty-one, she could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and stair with a perfect and fascinated familiarity.

When she entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence.  During her home life she had been an average child of the quick and clever type, with average faults.  But something in the bare, ugly rooms, the discipline, the teaching, the companionship of Miss Frederick’s Cliff House School for Young Ladies, transformed little Marcella Boyce, for the time being, into a demon.  She hated her lessons, though, when she chose, she could do them in a hundredth part of the time taken by her companions; she hated getting up in the wintry dark, and her cold ablutions with some dozen others in the comfortless lavatory; she hated the meals in the long schoolroom, where, because twice meat was forbidden and twice pudding allowed, she invariably hungered fiercely for more mutton and scorned her second course, making a sort of dramatic story to herself out of Miss Frederick’s tyranny and her own thwarted appetite as she sat black-browed and brooding in her place.  She was not a favourite with her companions, and she was a perpetual difficulty and trouble to her perfectly well-intentioned schoolmistress.  The whole of her first year was one continual series of sulks, quarrels, and revolts.

Perhaps her blackest days were the days she spent occasionally in bed, when Miss Frederick, at her wit’s end, would take advantage of one of the child’s perpetual colds to try the effects of a day’s seclusion and solitary confinement, administered in such a form that it could do her charge no harm, and might, she hoped, do her good.  “For I do believe a great part of it’s liver or nerves!  No child in her right senses could behave so,” she would declare to the mild and stout French lady who had been her partner for years, and who was more inclined to befriend and excuse Marcella than any one else in the house ­no one exactly knew why.

Now the rule of the house when any girl was ordered to bed with a cold was, in the first place, that she should not put her arms outside the bedclothes ­for if you were allowed to read and amuse yourself in bed you might as well be up; that the housemaid should visit the patient in the early morning with a cup of senna-tea, and at long and regular intervals throughout the day with beef-tea and gruel; and that no one should come to see and talk with her, unless, indeed, it were the doctor, quiet being in all cases of sickness the first condition of recovery, and the natural schoolgirl in Miss Frederick’s persuasion being more or less inclined to complain without cause if illness were made agreeable.

For some fourteen hours, therefore, on these days of durance Marcella was left almost wholly alone, nothing but a wild mass of black hair and a pair of roving, defiant eyes in a pale face showing above the bedclothes whenever the housemaid chose to visit her ­a pitiable morsel, in truth, of rather forlorn humanity.  For though she had her movements of fierce revolt, when she was within an ace of throwing the senna-tea in Martha’s face, and rushing downstairs in her nightgown to denounce Miss Frederick in the midst of an astonished schoolroom, something generally interposed; not conscience, it is to be feared, or any wish “to be good,” but only an aching, inmost sense of childish loneliness and helplessness; a perception that she had indeed tried everybody’s patience to the limit, and that these days in bed represented crises which must be borne with even by such a rebel as Marcie Boyce.

So she submitted, and presently learnt, under dire stress of boredom, to amuse herself a good deal by developing a natural capacity for dreaming awake.  Hour by hour she followed out an endless story of which she was always the heroine.  Before the annoyance of her afternoon gruel, which she loathed, was well forgotten, she was in full fairy-land again, figuring generally as the trusted friend and companion of the Princess of Wales ­of that beautiful Alexandra, the top and model of English society whose portrait in the window of the little stationer’s shop at Marswell ­the small country town near Cliff House ­had attracted the child’s attention once, on a dreary walk, and had ever since governed her dreams.  Marcella had no fairy-tales, but she spun a whole cycle for herself around the lovely Princess who came to seem to her before long her own particular property.  She had only to shut her eyes and she had caught her idol’s attention ­either by some look or act of passionate yet unobtrusive homage as she passed the royal carriage in the street ­or by throwing herself in front of the divinity’s runaway horses ­or by a series of social steps easily devised by an imaginative child, well aware, in spite of appearances, that she was of an old family and had aristocratic relations.  Then, when the Princess had held out a gracious hand and smiled, all was delight!  Marcella grew up on the instant:  she was beautiful, of course; she had, so people said, the “Boyce eyes and hair;” she had sweeping gowns, generally of white muslin with cherry-coloured ribbons; she went here and there with the Princess, laughing and talking quite calmly with the greatest people in the land, her romantic friendship with the adored of England making her all the time the observed of all observers, bringing her a thousand delicate flatteries and attentions.

Then, when she was at the very top of ecstasy, floating in the softest summer sea of fancy, some little noise would startle her into opening her eyes, and there beside her in the deepening dusk would be the bare white beds of her two dormitory companions, the ugly wall-paper opposite, and the uncovered boards with their frugal strips of carpet stretching away on either hand.  The tea-bell would ring perhaps in the depths far below, and the sound would complete the transformation of the Princess’s maid-of-honour into Marcie Boyce, the plain naughty child, whom nobody cared about, whose mother never wrote to her, who in contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single “party frock,” and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her cold was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a page of Ince’s “Outlines of English History” in the chilly schoolroom, at seven.

Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child’s daily miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social difference between herself and her companions.  Some proportion of the girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or three neighbouring towns.  Their tradesmen papas were sometimes ready to deal on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of her establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves airs which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider like Marcella Boyce.  Even at ten years old she perfectly understood that she was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle had been a famous Speaker of the House of Commons.  The portrait of this great-uncle had hung in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed so far away; her father had again and again pointed it out to the child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more than once her childish eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired gentleman who occasionally came to see them, and whom she called “Grandpapa.”  Through one influence and another she had drawn the glory of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into her childish blood.  There they were now ­the glory and the dignity ­a feverish leaven, driving her perpetually into the most crude and ridiculous outbreaks, which could lead to nothing but humiliation.

“I wish my great-uncle were here! He’d make you remember ­you great ­you great ­big bully you!” ­she shrieked on one occasion when she had been defying a big girl in authority, and the big girl ­the stout and comely daughter of a local ironmonger ­had been successfully asserting herself.

The big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed.

“Your great-uncle!  Upon my word!  And who may he be, miss?  If it comes to that, I’d like to show my great-uncle David how you’ve scratched my wrist.  He’d give it you.  He’s almost as strong as father, though he is so old.  You get along with you, and behave yourself, and don’t talk stuff to me.”

Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself pushed out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her.  She rushed up to the top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in a hidden niche of the wall, shaking and crying, ­now planning vengeance on her conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection of her own ill-bred and impotent folly.

No ­during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory declared, were three:  the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday ­Marcella sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly allowance; the mad games of “tig,” which she led and organised in the top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Renier, Miss Frederick’s partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small sister of her own, and surreptitiously indulged “the little wild-cat,” as the school generally dubbed the Speaker’s great-niece, whenever she could.

But with the third year fresh elements and interests had entered in.  Romance awoke, and with it certain sentimental affections.  In the first place, a taste for reading had rooted itself ­reading of the adventurous and poetical kind.  There were two or three books which Marcella had absorbed in a way it now made her envious to remember.  For at twenty-one people who take interest in many things, and are in a hurry to have opinions, must skim and “turn over” books rather than read them, must use indeed as best they may a scattered and distracted mind, and suffer occasional pangs of conscience as pretenders.  But at thirteen ­what concentration! what devotion! what joy!  One of these precious volumes was Bulwer’s “Rienzi”; another was Miss Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs”; a third was a little red volume of “Marmion” which an aunt had given her.  She probably never read any of them through ­she had not a particle of industry or method in her composition ­but she lived in them.  The parts which it bored her to read she easily invented for herself, but the scenes and passages which thrilled her she knew by heart; she had no gift for verse-making, but she laboriously wrote a long poem on the death of Rienzi, and she tried again and again with a not inapt hand to illustrate for herself in pen and ink the execution of Wallace.

But all these loves for things and ideas were soon as nothing in comparison with a friendship, and an adoration.

To take the adoration first.  When Marcella came to Cliff House she was recommended by the same relation who gave her “Marmion” to the kind offices of the clergyman of the parish, who happened to be known to some of the Boyce family.  He and his wife ­they had no children ­did their duty amply by the odd undisciplined child.  They asked her to tea once or twice; they invited her to the school-treat, where she was only self-conscious and miserably shy; and Mr. Ellerton had at least one friendly and pastoral talk with Miss Frederick as to the difficulties of her pupil’s character.  For a long time little came of it.  Marcella was hard to tame, and when she went to tea at the Rectory Mrs. Ellerton, who was refined and sensible, did not know what to make of her, though in some unaccountable way she was drawn to and interested by the child.  But with the expansion of her thirteenth year there suddenly developed in Marcie’s stormy breast an overmastering absorbing passion for these two persons.  She did not show it to them much, but for herself it raised her to another plane of existence, gave her new objects and new standards.  She who had hated going to church now counted time entirely by Sundays.  To see the pulpit occupied by any other form and face than those of the rector was a calamity hardly to be borne; if the exit of the school party were delayed by any accident so that Mr. and Mrs. Ellerton overtook them in the churchyard, Marcella would walk home on air, quivering with a passionate delight, and in the dreary afternoon of the school Sunday she would spend her time happily in trying to write down the heads of Mr. Ellerton’s sermon.  In the natural course of things she would, at this time, have taken no interest in such things at all, but whatever had been spoken by him had grace, thrill, meaning.

Nor was the week quite barren of similar delights.  She was generally sent to practise on an old square piano in one of the top rooms.  The window in front of her overlooked the long white drive and the distant high road into which it ran.  Three times a week on an average Mrs. Ellerton’s pony carriage might be expected to pass along that road.  Every day Marcella watched for it, alive with expectation, her fingers strumming as they pleased.  Then with the first gleam of the white pony in the distance, over would go the music stool, and the child leapt to the window, remaining fixed there, breathing quick and eagerly till the trees on the left had hidden from her the graceful erect figure of Mrs. Ellerton.  Then her moment of Paradise was over; but the afterglow of it lasted for the day.

So much for romance, for feelings as much like love as childhood can know them, full of kindling charm and mystery.  Her friendship had been of course different, but it also left deep mark.  A tall, consumptive girl among the Cliff House pupils, the motherless daughter of a clergyman-friend of Miss Frederick’s, had for some time taken notice of Marcella, and at length won her by nothing else, in the first instance, than a remarkable gift for story-telling.  She was a parlour-boarder, had a room to herself, and a fire in it when the weather was cold.  She was not held strictly to lesson hours; many delicacies in the way of food were provided for her, and Miss Frederick watched over her with a quite maternal solicitude.  When winter came she developed a troublesome cough, and the doctor recommended that a little suite of rooms looking south and leading out on the middle terrace of the garden should be given up to her.  There was a bedroom, an intermediate dressing-room, and then a little sitting-room built out upon the terrace, with a window-door opening upon it.

Here Mary Lant spent week after week.  Whenever lesson hours were done she clamoured for Marcie Boyce, and Marcella was always eager to go to her.  She would fly up stairs and passages, knock at the bedroom door, run down the steps to the queer little dressing-room where the roof nearly came on your head, and down more steps again to the sitting-room.  Then when the door was shut, and she was crooning over the fire with her friend, she was entirely happy.  The tiny room was built on the edge of the terrace, the ground fell rapidly below it, and the west window commanded a broad expanse of tame arable country, of square fields and hedges, and scattered wood.  Marcella, looking back upon that room, seemed always to see it flooded with the rays of wintry sunset, a kettle boiling on the fire, her pale friend in a shawl crouching over the warmth, and the branches of a snowberry tree, driven by the wind, beating against the terrace door.

But what a story-teller was Mary Lant!  She was the inventor of a story called “John and Julia,” which went on for weeks and months without ever producing the smallest satiety in Marcella.  Unlike her books of adventure, this was a domestic drama of the purest sort; it was extremely moral and evangelical, designed indeed by its sensitively religious author for Marcie’s correction and improvement.  There was in it a sublime hero, who set everybody’s faults to rights and lectured the heroine.  In real life Marcella would probably before long have been found trying to kick his shins ­a mode of warfare of which in her demon moods she was past mistress.  But as Mary Lant described him, she not only bore with and trembled before him ­she adored him.  The taste for him and his like, as well as for the story-teller herself ­a girl of a tremulous, melancholy fibre, sweet-natured, possessed by a Calvinist faith, and already prescient of death ­grew upon her.  Soon her absorbing desire was to be altogether shut up with Mary, except on Sundays and at practising times.  For this purpose she gave herself the worst cold she could achieve, and cherished diligently what she proudly considered to be a racking cough.  But Miss Frederick was deaf to the latter, and only threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and senna-tea for the former, whereupon Marcella in alarm declared that her cold was much better and gave up the cough in despair.  It was her first sorrow and cost her some days of pale brooding and silence, and some nights of stifled tears, when during an Easter holiday a letter from Miss Frederick to her mother announced the sudden death of Mary Lant.