Every day Marcella watched for it, alive with expectation, her fingers
strumming as they pleased. Then with the first gleam of the white pony
in the distance, over would go the music stool, and the child leapt to
the window, remaining fixed there, breathing quick and eagerly till the
trees on the left had hidden from her the graceful erect figure of Mrs.
Ellerton. Then her moment of Paradise was over; but the afterglow of it
lasted for the day.

So much for romance, for feelings as much like love as childhood can
know them, full of kindling charm and mystery. Her friendship had been
of course different, but it also left deep mark. A tall, consumptive
girl among the Cliff House pupils, the motherless daughter of a
clergyman-friend of Miss Frederick's, had for some time taken notice of
Marcella, and at length won her by nothing else, in the first instance,
than a remarkable gift for story-telling. She was a parlour-boarder, had
a room to herself, and a fire in it when the weather was cold. She was
not held strictly to lesson hours; many delicacies in the way of food
were provided for her, and Miss Frederick watched over her with a quite
maternal solicitude. When winter came she developed a troublesome cough,
and the doctor recommended that a little suite of rooms looking south
and leading out on the middle terrace of the garden should be given up
to her. There was a bedroom, an intermediate dressing-room, and then a
little sitting-room built out upon the terrace, with a window-door
opening upon it.

Here Mary Lant spent week after week. Whenever lesson hours were done
she clamoured for Marcie Boyce, and Marcella was always eager to go to
her. She would fly up stairs and passages, knock at the bedroom door,
run down the steps to the queer little dressing-room where the roof
nearly came on your head, and down more steps again to the sitting-room.