Then when the door was shut, and she was crooning over the fire with her
friend, she was entirely happy. The tiny room was built on the edge of
the terrace, the ground fell rapidly below it, and the west window
commanded a broad expanse of tame arable country, of square fields and
hedges, and scattered wood. Marcella, looking back upon that room,
seemed always to see it flooded with the rays of wintry sunset, a kettle
boiling on the fire, her pale friend in a shawl crouching over the
warmth, and the branches of a snowberry tree, driven by the wind,
beating against the terrace door.

But what a story-teller was Mary Lant! She was the inventor of a story
called "John and Julia," which went on for weeks and months without ever
producing the smallest satiety in Marcella. Unlike her books of
adventure, this was a domestic drama of the purest sort; it was
extremely moral and evangelical, designed indeed by its sensitively
religious author for Marcie's correction and improvement. There was in
it a sublime hero, who set everybody's faults to rights and lectured the
heroine. In real life Marcella would probably before long have been
found trying to kick his shins--a mode of warfare of which in her demon
moods she was past mistress. But as Mary Lant described him, she not
only bore with and trembled before him--she adored him. The taste for
him and his like, as well as for the story-teller herself--a girl of a
tremulous, melancholy fibre, sweet-natured, possessed by a Calvinist
faith, and already prescient of death--grew upon her. Soon her absorbing
desire was to be altogether shut up with Mary, except on Sundays and at
practising times. For this purpose she gave herself the worst cold she
could achieve, and cherished diligently what she proudly considered to
be a racking cough. But Miss Frederick was deaf to the latter, and only
threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and senna-tea for the former,
whereupon Marcella in alarm declared that her cold was much better and