Hallin had accepted the invitation with eagerness, and was throwing an intensity of labour into the writing of his three lectures which often seemed to his poor sister to be not only utterly beyond his physical strength, but to carry with it a note as of a last effort, a farewell message, such as her devoted affection could ill endure.  For all the time he was struggling with cardiac weakness and brain irritability which would have overwhelmed any one less accustomed to make his account with illness, or to balance against feebleness of body a marvellous discipline of soul.

Lord Maxwell was still alive, and Hallin, in the midst of his work, was looking anxiously for the daily reports from Aldous, living in his friend’s life almost as much as in his own—­handing on the reports, too, day by day to Marcella, with a manner which had somehow slipped into expressing a new and sure confidence in her sympathy—­when she one evening found Minta Hurd watching for her at the door with a telegram from her mother:  “Your father suddenly worse.  Please come at once.”  She arrived at Mellor late that same night.

On the same day Lord Maxwell died.  Less than a week later he was buried in the little Gairsley church.  Mr. Boyce was then alarmingly ill, and Marcella sat in his darkened room or in her own all day, thinking from time to time of what was passing three miles away—­of the great house in its mourning—­of the figures round the grave.  Hallin, of course, would be there.  It was a dripping September day, and she passed easily from moments of passionate yearning and clairvoyance to worry herself about the damp and the fatigue that Hallin must be facing.

Since then she had heard occasionally from Miss Hallin.  Everything was much as it had been, apparently.  Edward was still hard at work, still ill, still serene.  “Aldous”—­Miss Hallin could not yet reconcile herself to the new name—­was alone in the Curzon Street house, much occupied and harassed apparently by the legal business of the succession, by the election presently to be held in his own constituency, and by the winding-up of his work at the Home Office.  He was to resign his under-secretaryship; but with the new session and a certain rearrangement of offices it was probable that he would be brought back into the Ministry.  Meanwhile he was constantly with them; and she thought that his interest in Edward’s work and anxiety about his health were perhaps both good for him as helping to throw off something of his own grief and depression.

Whereby it will be noticed that Miss Hallin, like her brother, had by now come to speak intimately and freely to Marcella of her old lover and their friend.