of religious talk! What golden days in the holidays, when
long-looked-for letters arrived full of religious admonition, letters
which were carried about and wept over till they fell to pieces under
the stress of such a worship--what terrors and agonies of a stimulated
conscience--what remorse for sins committed at school--what zeal to
confess them in letters of a passionate eloquence--and what indifference
meanwhile to anything of the same sort that might have happened at home!

Strange faculty that women have for thus lavishing their heart's blood
from their very cradles! Marcella could hardly look back now, in the
quiet of thought, to her five years with Miss Pemberton without a shiver
of agitation. Yet now she never saw her. It was two years since they
parted; the school was broken up; her idol had gone to India to join a
widowed brother. It was all over--for ever. Those precious letters had
worn themselves away; so, too, had Marcella's religious feelings; she
was once more another being.

* * * * *

But these two years since she had said good-bye to Solesby and her
school days? Once set thinking of bygones by the stimulus of Mellor and
its novelty, Marcella must needs think, too, of her London life, of all
that it had opened to her, and meant for her. Fresh agitations!--fresh
passions!--but this time impersonal, passions of the mind and
sympathies.

At the time she left Solesby her father and mother were abroad, and it
was apparently not convenient that she should join them. Marcella,
looking back, could not remember that she had ever been much desired at
home. No doubt she had been often moody and tiresome in the holidays;