breach had always been deepest between her father and his relations, or
his oldest friends. A little shiver passed through her as she reflected
that here, in his own country, where his history was best known, the
feeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably be
strongest. Well, it _was_ hard upon them!--hard upon her mother--hard
upon her. In her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and the
dignities of her new position, how little she had thought of these
things! And there they were all the time--dogging and thwarting.

She walked slowly along, with her burden of flowers, through a laurel
path which led straight to the drive, and so, across it, to the little
church. The church stood all alone there under the great limes of the
Park, far away from parsonage and village--the property, it seemed, of
the big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south
sides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had been
already at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit
of necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.

It was the unpretending church of a hamlet, girt outside by the humble
graves of toiling and forgotten generations, and adorned, or, at any
rate, diversified within by a group of mural monuments, of various
styles and dates, but all of them bearing, in some way or another, the
name of Boyce--conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub-crowned tomb in
the chancel, marking the remains of that Parliamentarian Boyce who
fought side by side with Hampden, his boyish friend, at Chalgrove Field,
lived to be driven out of Westminster by Colonel Pryde, and to spend his
later years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and then
with the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithful
idea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a family
of any very great pretensions--a race for the most part of frugal,