Marcella Maxwell, however, had not been easily wooed by the man who now filled all the horizon of her life. At the time when Aldous Raeburn, as he then was--the grandson and heir of old Lord Maxwell--came across her first she was a handsome, undeveloped girl, of a type not uncommon in our modern world, belonging by birth to the country-squire class, and by the chances of a few years of student life in London to the youth that takes nothing on authority, and puts to fierce question whatever it finds already on its path--Governments, Churches, the powers of family and wealth--that takes, moreover, its social pity for the only standard, and spends that pity only on one sort and type of existence. She accepted Raeburn, then the best _parti_ in the county, without understanding or loving him, simply that she might use his power and wealth for certain social ends to which the crude philanthropy of her youth had pledged itself. Naturally, they were no sooner engaged than Raeburn found himself launched upon a long wrestle with the girl who had thus--in the selfishness of her passionate idealist youth--opened her relation to him with a deliberate affront to the heart offered her. The engagement had stormy passages, and was for a time wholly broken off. Aldous was made bitterly jealous, or miserably unhappy. Marcella left the old house in the neighbourhood of the Maxwell property, where her lover had first seen and courted her. She plunged into London life, and into nursing, that common outlet for the woman at war with herself or society. She suffered and struggled, and once or twice she came very near to throwing away all her chances of happiness. But in the end, Maxwell tamed her; Maxwell recovered her. The rise of love in the unruly, impetuous creature, when the rise came, was like the sudden growth of some great forest flower. It spread with transforming beauty over the whole nature, till at last the girl who had once looked upon him as the mere tool of her own moral ambitions threw herself upon Maxwell's heart with a self-abandoning passion and penitence, which her developed powers and her adorable beauty made a veritable intoxication.