So Hallin read it.
* * * * * Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with, and spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings, committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either man to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything outside the clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of intense and monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a tiny cottage, hanging over sick-beds, and thrilling to each pulse of anguish as it beat in the miserable beings she tended.
The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks--till after Easter--without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in village and county.

And when the reason was known--that it was because Miss Boyce had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that until the whole affair was over, and the men either executed or reprieved, she could spare no thought to wedding clothes or cates--there was curiously little sympathy with Marcella.

Most of her own class thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss Raeburn--something done for self-advertisement and to advance anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.
"She can't be very fond o' 'im, not of Muster Raeburn, she can't," said old Patton, delivering himself as he sat leaning on his stick at his open door, while his wife and another woman or two chattered inside.
"_Not_ what I'd call lover-y.

She don't want to run in harness, she don't, no sooner than, she need.

She's a peert filly is Miss Boyce." "I've been a-waitin', an' a-waitin'," said his wife, with her gentle sigh, "to hear summat o' that new straw-plaitin' she talk about.