But Marcella sprang forward. Mercifully, there is a limit to nerve endurance, and Letty in her raving had overpassed it. She sank gasping on a sofa, still putting out her hand as though to protect herself. But Marcella knelt beside her, the tears running down her cheeks. She put her arms--arms formed for tenderness, for motherliness--round the girl's slight frame. "Don't--don't repulse me," she said, with trembling lips, and suddenly Letty yielded. She found herself sobbing in Lady Maxwell's embrace, while all the healing, all the remorse, all the comfort that self-abandonment and pity can pour out on such a plight as hers, descended upon her from Marcella's clinging touch, her hurried, fragmentary words. Assurances that all could be made right entreaties for gentleness and patience--revelations of her own inmost heart as a wife, far too sacred for the ears of Letty Tressady--little phrases and snatches of autobiography steeped in an exquisite experience: the nature Letty had rained her blows upon, kept nothing back, gave her all its best. How irrelevant much of it was!--chequered throughout by those oblivions, and optimisms, and foolish hopes by which such a nature as Marcella's protects itself from the hard facts of the world. By the time she had ranged through every note of entreaty and consolation, Marcella had almost persuaded herself and Letty that George Tressady had never said a word to her beyond the commonplaces of an ordinary friendship; she had passionately determined that this blurred and spoiled marriage could and should be mended, and that it lay with her to do it; and in the spirit of her audacious youth she had taken upon herself the burden of Letty's character and fate, vowing herself to a moral mission, to a long patience. The quality of her own nature, perhaps, made her bear Letty's violences and frenzies more patiently than would have been possible to a woman of another type; generous remorse and regret, combined with her ignorance of Letty's history and the details of Letty's life, led her even to look upon these violences as the effects of love perverted, the anguish of a jealous heart. Imagination, keen and loving, drew the situation for her in rapid strokes, draped Letty in the subtleties and powers of her own heart, and made forbearance easy.