It was as though creatures built for a normal life of easy give and take with their fellows had fallen upon some unfitting and jarring experience.

One striking difference, indeed, there was between them, for amid the brother's timidity and sweetness there lay, clearly to be felt and seen, the consciousness of the priest--nascent and immature, but already urging and characteristic.
Only one face of the three showed any other emotion than quick pleasure at the sight of Marcella Boyce.

Aldous Raeburn was clearly embarrassed thereby.

Indeed, as he laid down his gun outside the low churchyard wall, while Marcella and the Hardens were greeting, that generally self-possessed though modest person was conscious of a quite disabling perturbation of mind.

Why in the name of all good manners and decency had he allowed himself to be discovered in shooting trim, on that particular morning, by Mr.Boyce's daughter on her father's land, and within a stone's throw of her father's house?
Was he not perfectly well aware of the curt note which his grandfather had that morning despatched to the new owner of Mellor?
Had he not ineffectually tried to delay execution the night before, thereby puzzling and half-offending his grandfather?
Had not the incident weighed on him ever since, wounding an admiration and sympathy which seemed to have stolen upon him in the dark, during these few weeks since he had made Miss Boyce's acquaintance, so strong and startling did he all in a moment feel them to be?
And then to intrude upon her thus, out of nothing apparently but sheer moth-like incapacity to keep away! The church footpath indeed was public property, and Miss Harden's burdens had cried aloud to any passing male to help her.