Yet Marcella was here at last. And as she looked round her large bare
room, with its old dilapidated furniture, and then out again to woods
and lawns, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her
childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out--atoned for by
this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so
deplorably!--since no one could have reasonably expected that an
apparently sound man of sixty would have succumbed in three days to the
sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted
successfully a score of times before.

Her great desire now was to put the past--the greater part of it at any
rate--behind her altogether. Its shabby worries were surely done with,
poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present
position. At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl, paid
for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket-money,
and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or
fancied slur; she was no longer even the half-Bohemian student of these
past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity
of keeping her boarding-house expenses down to the lowest possible
figure would allow. She was something altogether different. She was
Marcella Boyce, a "finished" and grown-up young woman of twenty-one, the
only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mellor Park, inheritress of one
of the most ancient names in Midland England, and just entering on a
life which to her own fancy and will, at any rate, promised the highest
possible degree of interest and novelty.

Yet, in the very act of putting her past away from her, she only
succeeded, so it seemed, in inviting it to repossess her.