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.