with one figure only—­the figure of her schoolmistress, Miss Pemberton; and with one emotion only—­a passion, an adoration, akin to that she had lavished on the Ellertons, but now much more expressive and mature.  A tall slender woman with brown, grey-besprinkled hair falling in light curls after the fashion of our grandmothers on either cheek, and braided into a classic knot behind—­the face of a saint, an enthusiast—­eyes overflowing with feeling above a thin firm mouth—­the mouth of the obstinate saint, yet sweet also:  this delicate significant picture was stamped on Marcella’s heart.  What tremors of fear and joy could she not remember in connection with it? what night-vigils when a tired girl kept herself through long hours awake that she might see at last the door open and a figure with a night-lamp standing an instant in the doorway?—­for Miss Pemberton, who slept little and read late, never went to rest without softly going the rounds of her pupils’ rooms.  What storms of contest, mainly provoked by Marcella for the sake of the emotions, first of combat, then of reconciliation to which they led!  What a strange development on the pupil’s side of a certain histrionic gift, a turn for imaginative intrigue, for endless small contrivances such as might rouse or heighten the recurrent excitements of feeling!  What agitated moments of religious talk!  What golden days in the holidays, when long-looked-for letters arrived full of religious admonition, letters which were carried about and wept over till they fell to pieces under the stress of such a worship—­what terrors and agonies of a stimulated conscience—­what remorse for sins committed at school—­what zeal to confess them in letters of a passionate eloquence—­and what indifference meanwhile to anything of the same sort that might have happened at home!

Strange faculty that women have for thus lavishing their heart’s blood from their very cradles!  Marcella could hardly look back now, in the quiet of thought, to her five years with Miss Pemberton without a shiver of agitation.  Yet now she never saw her.  It was two years since they parted; the school was broken up; her idol had gone to India to join a widowed brother.  It was all over—­for ever.  Those precious letters had worn themselves away; so, too, had Marcella’s religious feelings; she was once more another being.

* * * * *

But these two years since she had said good-bye to Solesby and her school days?  Once set thinking of bygones by the stimulus of Mellor and its novelty, Marcella must needs think, too, of her London life, of all that it had opened to her, and meant for her.  Fresh agitations!—­fresh passions!—­but this time impersonal, passions of the mind and sympathies.