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.

CHAPTER II.

Friendship and love are humanising things, and by her fourteenth year Marcella was no longer a clever little imp, but a fast-maturing and in some ways remarkable girl, with much of the woman in her already.  She had begun even to feel an interest in her dress, to speculate occasionally on her appearance.  At the fourth breaking-up party after her arrival at Cliff House, Marcella, who had usually figured on these occasions in a linsey-woolsey high to the throat, amid the frilled and sashed splendours of her companions, found lying on her bed, when she went up with the others to dress, a plain white muslin dress with blue ribbons.  It was the gift of old Mademoiselle Renier, who affectionately wished her queer, neglected favourite to look well.  Marcella examined it and fingered it with an excited mixture of feelings.  First of all there was the sore and swelling bitterness that she should owe such things to the kindness of the French governess, whereas finery for the occasion had been freely sent to all the other girls from “home.”  She very nearly turned her back upon the bed and its pretty burden.  But then the mere snowy whiteness of the muslin and freshness of the ribbons, and the burning curiosity to see herself decked therein, overcame a nature which, in the midst of its penury, had been always really possessed by a more than common hunger for sensuous beauty and seemliness.  Marcella wore it, was stormily happy in it, and kissed Mademoiselle Renier for it at night with an effusion, nay, some tears, which no one at Cliff House had ever witnessed in her before except with the accompaniments of rage and fury.

A little later her father came to see her, the first and only visit he paid to her at school.  Marcella, to whom he was by now almost a stranger, received him demurely, making no confidences, and took him over the house and gardens.  When he was about to leave her a sudden upswell of paternal sentiment made him ask her if she was happy and if she wanted anything.

“Yes!” said Marcella, her large eyes gleaming; “tell mamma I want a ‘fringe.’  Every other girl in the school has got one.”

And she pointed disdainfully to her plainly parted hair.  Her father, astonished by her unexpected vehemence, put up his eyeglass and studied the child’s appearance.  Three days later, by her mother’s permission, Marcella was taken to the hairdresser at Marswell by Mademoiselle Renier, returned in all the glories of a “fringe,” and, in acknowledgment thereof, wrote her mother a letter which for the first time had something else than formal news in it.