The plight of this handful of human beings worked in Marcella like some fevering torture.  She was wholly out of gear physically and morally.  Another practically sleepless night, peopled with images of horror, had decreased her stock of sane self-control, already lessened by long conflict of feeling and the pressure of self-contempt.  Now, as she lay listening for Aldous Raeburn’s ring and step, she hardly knew whether to be angry with him for coming so late, or miserable that he should come at all.  That there was a long score to settle between herself and him she knew well.  Shame for an experience which seemed to her maiden sense indelible—­both a weakness and a treachery—­lay like a dull weight on heart and conscience.  But she would not realise it, she would not act upon it.  She shook the moral debate from her impatiently.  Aldous should have his due all in good time—­should have ample opportunity of deciding whether he would, after all, marry such a girl as she.  Meanwhile his attitude with regard to the murder exasperated her.  Yet, in some strange way it relieved her to be angry and sore with him—­to have a grievance she could avow, and on which she made it a merit to dwell.  His gentle, yet firm difference of opinion with her on the subject struck her as something new in him.  It gave her a kind of fierce pleasure to fight it.  He seemed somehow to be providing her with excuses—­to be coming down to her level—­to be equalling wrong with wrong.

The door handle turned.  At last!  She sprang up.  But it was only William coming in with the evening post.  Mrs. Boyce followed him.  She took a quiet look at her daughter, and asked if her headache was better, and then sat down near her to some needlework.  During these two days she had been unusually kind to Marcella.  She had none of the little feminine arts of consolation.  She was incapable of fussing, and she never caressed.  But from the moment that Marcella had come home from the village that morning, a pale, hollow-eyed wreck, the mother had asserted her authority.  She would not hear of the girl’s crossing the threshold again; she had put her on the sofa and dosed her with sal-volatile.  And Marcella was too exhausted to rebel.  She had only stipulated that a note should be sent to Aldous, asking him to come on to Mellor with the news as soon as the verdict of the coroner’s jury should be given.  The jury had been sitting all day, and the verdict was expected in the evening.

Marcella turned over her letters till she came to one from a London firm which contained a number of cloth patterns.  As she touched it she threw it aside with a sudden gesture of impatience, and sat upright.

“Mamma!  I have something to say to you.”

“Yes, my dear.”

“Mamma, the wedding must be put off!—­it must!—­for some weeks.  I have been thinking about it while I have been lying here.  How can I?—­you can see for yourself.  That miserable woman depends on me altogether.  How can I spend my time on clothing and dressmakers?  I feel as if I could think of nothing else—­nothing else in the world—­but her and her children.”  She spoke with difficulty, her voice high and strained.  “The assizes may be held that very week—­who knows?—­the very day we are married.”