She stopped, looking at her mother almost threateningly.  Mrs. Boyce showed no sign of surprise.  She put her work down.

“I had imagined you might say something of the kind,” she said after a pause.  “I don’t know that, from your point of view, it is unreasonable.  But, of course, you must understand that very few people will see it from your point of view.  Aldous Raeburn may—­you must know best.  But his people certainly won’t; and your father will think it—­”

“Madness,” she was going to say, but with her usual instinct for the moderate fastidious word she corrected it to “foolish.”

Marcella’s tired eyes were all wilfulness and defiance.

“I can’t help it.  I couldn’t do it.  I will tell Aldous at once.  It must be put off for a month.  And even that,” she added with a shudder, “will be bad enough.”

Mrs. Boyce could not help an unperceived shrug of the shoulders, and a movement of pity towards the future husband.  Then she said drily,—­

“You must always consider whether it is just to Mr. Raeburn to let a matter of this kind interfere so considerably with his wishes and his plans.  He must, I suppose, be in London for Parliament within six weeks.”

Marcella did not answer.  She sat with her hands round her knees lost in perplexities.  The wedding, as originally fixed, was now three weeks and three days off.  After it, she and Aldous were to have spent a short fortnight’s honeymoon at a famous house in the north, lent them for the occasion by a Duke who was a cousin of Aldous’s on the mother’s side, and had more houses than he knew what to do with.  Then they were to go immediately up to London for the opening of Parliament.  The furnishing of the Mayfair house was being pressed on.  In her new-born impatience with such things, Marcella had hardly of late concerned herself with it at all, and Miss Raeburn, scandalised, yet not unwilling, had been doing the whole of it, subject to conscientious worryings of the bride, whenever she could be got hold of, on the subject of papers and curtains.

As they sat silent, the unspoken idea in the mother’s mind was—­“Eight weeks more will carry us past the execution.”  Mrs. Boyce had already possessed herself very clearly of the facts of the case, and it was her perception that Marcella was throwing herself headlong into a hopeless struggle—­together with something else—­a confession perhaps of a touch of greatness in the girl’s temper, passionate and violent as it was, that had led to this unwonted softness of manner, this absence of sarcasm.

Very much the same thought—­only treated as a nameless horror not to be recognised or admitted—­was in Marcella’s mind also, joined however with another, unsuspected even by Mrs. Boyce’s acuteness.  “Very likely—­when I tell him—­he will not want to marry me at all—­and of course I shall tell him.”

But not yet—­certainly not yet.  She had the instinctive sense that during the next few weeks she should want all her dignity with Aldous, that she could not afford to put herself at a disadvantage with him.  To be troubled about her own sins at such a moment would be like the meanness of the lazy and canting Christian, who whines about saving his soul while he ought to be rather occupied with feeding the bodies of his wife and children.