Still--" She dropped on a stool beside the open window, and as her eyes steeped themselves afresh in what they saw, the frown disappeared again in the former look of glowing content--that content of youth which is never merely passive, nay, rather, contains an invariable element of covetous eagerness.
It was but three months or so since Marcella's father, Mr.Richard Boyce, had succeeded to the ownership of Mellor Park the old home of the Boyces, and it was little more than six weeks since Marcella had received her summons home from the students' boarding-house in Kensington, where she had been lately living.

She had ardently wished to assist in the June "settling-in," having not been able to apply her mind to the music or painting she was supposed to be studying, nor indeed to any other subject whatever, since the news of their inheritance had reached her.

But her mother in a dry little note had let it be known that she preferred to manage the move for herself.

Marcella had better go on with her studies as long as possible.
Yet Marcella was here at last.

And as she looked round her large bare room, with its old dilapidated furniture, and then out again to woods and lawns, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out--atoned for by this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so deplorably!--since no one could have reasonably expected that an apparently sound man of sixty would have succumbed in three days to the sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted successfully a score of times before.
Her great desire now was to put the past--the greater part of it at any rate--behind her altogether.