years had brought her of her natural power over men and things. She knew
perfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her age
could never venture--that she had fascination, resource, brain.

Already, in these few weeks--Smiles played about her lips as she thought
of that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at the
Hardens'. His grandfather might write what he pleased. It did not alter
the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly one
of the _partis_ most coveted, and one of the men most observed, in the
neighbourhood, had taken and shown a very marked interest in Mr. Boyce's
daughter--all the more marked because of the reserved manner with which
it had to contend.

No! whatever happened, she would carve her path, make her own way, and
her parents' too. At twenty-one, nothing looks irrevocable. A woman's
charm, a woman's energy should do it all.

Ay, and something else too. She looked quickly round the church, her
mind swelling with the sense of the Cravens' injustice and distrust.
Never could she be more conscious than here--on this very spot--of
mission, of an urging call to the service of man. In front of her was
the Boyces' family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretched
bench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat when
it came to church. Here, for the first time, had Marcella been brought
face to face with the agricultural world as it is--no stage ruralism,
but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects. Men of sixty and
upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had
worked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of their
generation, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but the
workhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impassive,