But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share.  In the first place, she was tired of idleness.  In the early days after Lady Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living.  But she had been here a fortnight, and was now pining to go back to work.  Her mood was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort and folded hands.  She told herself that she had no longer any place among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her heart was somehow wrestling—­must somehow wrestle—­its passionate way.  But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover, under-going treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her nursing—­a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent and moody.

On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she had saved—­probably at some risk of her own.  The poor victim would go scarred and maimed through what remained to her of existence.  But she lived; and—­as Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had abundantly made up their minds—­would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future.

Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest.  She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her and Aldous Raeburn.  He had called two or three times since she had been with Lady Winterbourne; he had done his best to make her inevitable appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible; the man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in common politeness and humanity.  But each time they met his manner had been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had let it count with him so little.

Childishly, angrily—­she wanted him to be friends! Why shouldn’t he?  He would certainly marry Betty Macdonald in time, whatever Mr. Hallin might say.  Then why not put his pride away and be generous?  Their future lives must of necessity touch each other, for they were bound to the same neighbourhood, the same spot of earth.  She knew herself to be her father’s heiress.  Mellor must be hers some day; and before that day,