and idle toil of wealth.  All that picture of herself, stooping from place and power, to bind up the wounds of the people, in which she had once delighted, was to her now a mere flimsy vulgarity.  She had been shown other ideals—­other ways—­and her pulses were still swaying under the audacity—­the virile inventive force of the showman.  Everything she had once desired looked flat to her; everything she was not to have, glowed and shone.  Poverty, adventure, passion, the joys of self-realisation—­these she gave up.  She would become Lady Maxwell, make friends with Miss Raeburn, and wear the family diamonds!

Then, in the midst of her rage with herself and fate, she drew herself away, looked up, and caught full the eyes of Aldous Raeburn.  Conscience stung and burned.  What was this life she had dared to trifle with—­this man she had dared to treat as a mere pawn in her own game?  She gave way utterly, appalled at her own misdoing, and behaved like a penitent child.  Aldous, astonished and alarmed by her emotions and by the wild incoherent things she said, won his way at last to some moments of divine happiness, when, leaving her trembling hand in his, she sat submissively beside him, gradually quieting down, summoning back her smiles and her beauty, and letting him call her all the fond names he would.

CHAPTER VIII.

Scarcely a word was exchanged between Marcella and her mother on the drive home.  Yet under ordinary circumstances Marcella’s imagination would have found some painful exercise in the effort to find out in what spirit her mother had taken the evening—­the first social festivity in which Richard Boyce’s wife had taken part for sixteen years.  In fact, Mrs. Boyce had gone through it very quietly.  After her first public entry on Lord Maxwell’s arm she had sat in her corner, taking keen note of everything, enjoying probably the humours of her kind.  Several old acquaintances who had seen her at Mellor as a young wife in her first married years had come up with some trepidation to speak to her.  She had received them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had gone away under the impression that she regarded herself as restored to society by this great match that her daughter was making.  Lady Winterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; and both Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested in smoothing the effort to her as much as they could.  She meanwhile watched Marcella—­except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she did not see—­and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and to Hallin.