"Algitha will be worthy of our parents, I think," said Hadria, "though she has commenced her career by disobeying them."

"And you too must turn your power to account."

"You can't conceive how difficult it is."

"I can very easily. I see that the sacrifice of her own development, which your mother has made for your sakes, is taking its inevitable revenge upon her, and upon you all. One can't doom one's best powers to decay, however excellent the motive, without bringing punishment upon oneself and one's children, in some form or other. You will have to fight against that penalty. I know you will not have a smooth time of it; but who has, except cowards and weaklings? Your safeguard will be in your work."

"And my difficulty," said Hadria. "In the world that I was born into (for my sins), when one tries to do something that other people don't do, it is like trying to get up early in a house where the breakfast-hour is late. Nothing fits in with one's eccentric custom; everything conspires to discourage it."

"I wish I could give you a helping hand," said the Professor wistfully; "but one is so powerless. Each of us has to fight the real battle of life alone. Nobody can see with our eyes, or feel with our nerves. The crux of the difficulty each bears for himself. But friendship can help us to believe the struggle worth while; it can sustain our courage and it can offer sympathy in victory,—but still more faithfully in defeat."



CHAPTER XII.

Hadria had determined upon making a strong and patient effort to pursue her work during the winter, while doing her best, at the same time, to please her mother, and to make up to her, as well as she could, for Algitha's departure. She would not be dismayed by difficulties: as the Professor said, only cowards and weaklings escaped these. She treated herself austerely, and found her power of concentration increasing, and her hold on herself greater. But, as usual, her greatest effort had to be given, not to the work itself, but to win opportunity to pursue it. Mrs. Fullerton opposed her daughter's endeavours as firmly as ever. It was not good for a girl to be selfishly pre-occupied. She ought to think of others.

If Hadria yielded the point on any particular occasion, her mood and her work were destroyed: if she resisted, they were equally destroyed, through the nervous disturbance and the intense depression which followed the winning of a liberty too dearly bought. The incessant rising and quelling of her impulse and her courage—like the ebb and flow of tides—represented a vast amount of force not merely wasted, but expended in producing a dangerous wear and tear upon the system. The process told upon her health, and was the beginning of the weakening and unbalancing of the splendid constitution which Hadria, in common with every member of the family, enjoyed as a birthright. The injury was insidious but serious. Hadria, unable to command any certain part of the day, began to sit up at night. This led to a direct clash of wills. Mr. Fullerton said that the girl was doing her best to ruin her health for life; Mrs. Fullerton wished to know why Hadria, who had all the day at her disposal, could not spend the night rationally.

"But I haven't all the day, or any part of it, for certain," said Hadria.

"If you grudge the little services you do for me, pray abandon them," said the mother, genuinely hurt.

Hadria entered her room, one evening, tired out and profoundly depressed. A table, covered with books, stood beside the fire. She gave the top-heavy pile an impatient thrust and the mass fell, with a great crash, to the floor. A heap of manuscript—her musical achievement for the past year—was involved in the fall. She contemplated the wreck gravely.

"Yes, it is I who am weak, not circumstance that is strong. If I could keep my mind unmoved by the irritations; if I could quarrel with mother, and displease father, and offend all the world without a qualm, or without losing the delicate balance of thought and mood necessary for composition, then I should, to some extent, triumph over my circumstances; I should not lose so much time in this wretched unstringing. Only were I so immovably constituted, is it probable that I should be able to compose at all?"

She drew the score towards her. "People are surprised that women have never done anything noteworthy in music. People are so intelligent!" She turned over the pages critically. If only this instinct were not so overwhelmingly strong! Hadria wondered how many other women, from the beginning of history, had cursed the impulse to create! Fortunately, it was sometimes extinguished altogether, as to-night, for instance, when every impression, every desire was swept clean out of her, and her mind presented a creditable blank, such as really ought to satisfy the most exacting social mentor. In such a state, a woman might be induced to accept anything!

Hadria brought out two letters from her pocket; one from the Professor, the other from Miss Du Prel. The latter had been writing frequently of late, pointing out the danger of Hadria's exaggerated ideas, and the probability of their ruining her happiness in life. Valeria had suffered herself from "ideas," and knew how fatal they were. Life could not be exactly as one would have it, and it was absolutely necessary, in order to avoid misery for oneself and others, to consent to take things more or less as they were; to make up one's mind to bend a little, rather than have to break, in the end. Things were never quite so shocking as they seemed to one's youthful imagination. The world was made up of compromises. Good was mixed with evil everywhere. The domestic idea, as Hadria called it, might be, in its present phase, somewhat offensive, but it could be redeemed in its application, in the details and "extenuating circumstances." Valeria could not warn Hadria too earnestly against falling into the mistake that Valeria herself had made. She had repudiated the notion of anything short of an ideal union; a perfect comradeship, without the shadow of restraint or bondage in the relationship; and not having found it, she had refused the tie altogether. She could not bring herself to accept the lesser thing, having conceived the possibility of the greater. She now saw her error, and repented it. She was reaping the penalty in a lonely and unsatisfied life. For a long time her work had seemed to suffice, but she felt now that she had been trusting to a broken reed. She was terrified at her solitude. She could not face the thought of old age, without a single close tie, without a home, without a hold upon her race.

She ended by entreating Hadria not to refuse marriage merely because she could not find a man to agree with her in everything, or capable of entering into the spirit of the relationship that perhaps would unite the men and women of the future. It was a pity that Hadria had not been born a generation later, but since she had come into the world at this time of transition, she must try to avoid the tragedy that threatens all spirits who are pointing towards the new order, while the old is still working out its unexhausted impetus.

This reiterated advice had begun to trouble Hadria. It did not convince her, but Valeria's words were incessantly repeating themselves in her mind; working as a ferment among her thoughts.

The letters from Miss Du Prel and the Professor were to her, a source of great pleasure and of great pain. In her depressed moods, they would often rather increase her despondency, because the writers used to take for granted so many achievements that she had not been able to accomplish.

"They think I am living and progressing as they are; they do not know that the riot and stir of intellectual life has ceased. I am like a creature struggling in a quicksand."

On the Professor's letter, the comments were of a different character.

He had recommended her to read certain books, and reminded her that no possessor of good books could lack the privilege of spiritual sanctuary.

"Ah! yes, I know few pleasures so great as that of finding one's own idea, or hope, or longing, finely expressed, half-born thoughts alive and of stately stature; and then the exquisite touches of art upon quick nerves, the enlarging of the realms of imagination, knowledge, the heightening of perceptions, intuitions; finally the blessed power of escaping from oneself, with the paradoxical reward of greater self-realization! But, ah, Professor, to me there is a 'but' even here. I am oppressed by a sense of the discrepancy between the world that books disclose to me, and the world that I myself inhabit. In books, the impossibilities are all left out. They give you no sense of the sordid Inevitable that looms so large on the grey horizon. Another more personal quarrel that I have with books is on account of their attacking all my pet prejudices, and sneering at the type of woman that I have the misfortune to belong to. I am always exhorted to cure myself of being myself. Nothing less would suffice. Now this is wounding. All my particular feelings, my strongest beliefs, are condemned, directly or by inference. I could almost believe that there is a literary conspiracy to reform me. The "true women" of literature infallibly think and feel precisely as I do not think and feel, while the sentiments that I detest—woe is me—are lauded to the skies. Truly, if we women don't know exactly what we ought to think and feel, it is not for want of telling. Yet you say, Professor, in this very letter, that the sense of having a peculiar experience is always an illusion, that every feeling of ours has been felt before, if not in our own day, then in the crowded past, with its throngs of forgotten lives and unrecorded experiences. I wish to heaven I could meet those who have had exactly mine!"

Hadria did not keep up an active correspondence with Miss Du Prel or with the Professor. She had no idea of adding to the burden of their busy lives, by wails for sympathy. It seemed to her feeble, and contemptible, to ask to be dragged up by their strength, instead of exerting her own. If that were insufficient, why then let her go down, as thousands had gone down before her. As a miser telling his gold, she would read and re-read those occasional letters, written amidst the stress of life at high pressure, and bearing evidence of that life of thought and work, in their tense, full-packed phrases. With what a throb of longing and envy Hadria used to feel the vibration through her own nerves! It was only when completely exhausted and harassed that the response was lacking. To-night everything seemed to be obliterated. Her hope, her interest were, for the moment, tired out. Her friends would be disappointed in her, but there was no help for it.

She picked up the score of her music, and stood, with a handful of the once precious offspring of her brain held out towards the flames. Then she drew it back, and half closed her eyes in self-scrutinizing thought. "Come now," she said to herself, "are you sincere in your intention of giving up? Are you not doing this in a fit of spite against destiny? as if destiny cared two straws. Heavens! what a poor little piece of melodrama. And to think that you should have actually taken yourself in it by it. One acts so badly with only oneself for audience. You know perfectly well that you are not going to give in, you are not going to attempt to stifle that which is the centre of your life; you have not courage for such slow suicide. Don't add insincerity to the other faults that are laid to your account——" She mused over the little self-administered lecture. And probing down into her consciousness, she realized that she could not face the thought of surrender. She meant to fight on. The notion of giving in had been seized instinctively, for a moment of rest. Nothing should really make her cease the struggle, until the power itself had been destroyed. She was sure of it, in her heart, in spite of failures and miserably inadequate expressions of it. Suddenly, as a shaft of light through parting clouds, came bursting forth, radiant, rejoicing, that sense of power, large, resistless, genial as morning sunshine. Yes, yes, let them say what they might, discourage, smile, or frown as they would, the faculty was given to her, and she would fight for opportunity to use it while she had breath.



CHAPTER XIII.

As if it had all been ingeniously planned, the minutest incidents and conditions of Hadria's life conspired towards the event that was to decide its drift for ever.

Often, in the dim afternoon, she would sit by the window and watch the rain sweeping across the country, longing then for Temperley's music, which used to make the wild scene so unspeakably beautiful. Now there was no music, no music anywhere, only this fierce and mournful rush of the wind, which seemed as if it were trying to utter some universal grief. At sunset, braving the cold, she would mount the creaking staircase, pass along the silent upper corridors, and on through the empty rooms to the garret in the tower. The solitude was a relief; the strangeness of the scene appealed to some wild instinct, and to the intense melancholy that lurks in the Celtic nature.

Even at night, she did not shrink from braving the glooms and silences of the deserted upper floor, nor the solitude of the garret, which appeared the deeper, from the many memories of happy evenings that it evoked. She wished Ernest would come home. It was so long since she had seen her favourite brother. She could not bear the thought of his drifting away from her. What talks they had had in this old garret!

These nights in the tower, among the winds, soothed the trouble of her spirit as nothing else had power to do. The mystery of life, the thrill of existence, touched her with a strange joy that ran perilously near to pain. What vast dim possibilities lurked out there, in the hollows of the hills! What inspiration thundered in the voice of the prophet wind!

Once, she had gone downstairs and out, alone, in a tearing storm, to wander across the bleak pastures, wrapt round by the wind as by a flame; at one with the desperate elemental thing.

The wanderer felt herself caught into the heart of some vast unknown power, of which the wind was but a thrall, until she became, for a moment, consciously part of that which was universal. Her personality grew dim; she stood, as it seemed, face to face with Nature, divided from the ultimate truth by only a thin veil, to temper the splendour and the terror. Then the tension of personal feeling was loosened. She saw how entirely vain and futile were the things of life that we grieve and struggle over.

It was not a side, an aspect of existence, but the whole of it that seemed to storm round her, in the darkness. No wonder, when the wind was let loose among the mountains, that the old Highland people thought that their dead were about them. All night long, after Hadria returned to her room in the keep, the wind kept up its cannonade against the walls, hooting in the chimneys with derisive voices, and flinging itself, in mad revolt, against the old-established hills and the stable earth, which changed its forms only in slow obedience to the persuadings of the elements, in the passing of centuries. It cared nothing for the passion of a single storm.

And then came reaction, doubt. After all, humanity was a puny production of the Ages. Men and women were like the struggling animalculae that her father had so often shewn the boys, in a drop of magnified ditch-water; yet not quite like those microscopic insects, for the stupendous processes of life had at last created a widening consciousness, a mind which could perceive the bewildering vastness of Nature and its own smallness, which could, in some measure, get outside its own particular ditch, and the strife and struggle of it, groping upwards for larger realities—

"Over us stars and under us graves."

To go down next morning to breakfast; to meet the usual homely events, was bewildering after such a night. Which was dream: this or that? So solid and convincing seemed, at times, the interests and objects of every day, that Hadria would veer round to a sudden conviction that these things, or what they symbolized, were indeed the solid facts of human life, and that all other impressions arose from the disorderly working of overcharged brain-cells. It was a little ailment of youth and would pass off. Had it been possible to describe to her father the impressions made upon her by the world and Nature, as they had presented themselves to her imagination from her childhood, he would have prescribed change of air and gymnastics. Perhaps that was the really rational view of the matter. But what if these hygienic measures cured her of the haunting consciousness of mystery and vastness; what if she became convinced of the essential importance of the Gordon pedigree, or of the amount of social consideration due to the family who had taken Clarenoc? Would that alter the bewildering truths of which she would have ceased to think?

No; it would only mean that the animalcule had returned to the occupations of its ditch, while the worlds and the peoples went spinning to their destiny.

"Do the duty that lies nearest thee," counselled everybody: people of all kinds, books of all kinds. "Cheap, well-sounding advice," thought Hadria, "sure of popularity! Continue to wriggle industriously, O animalcule, in that particular ditch wherein it has pleased heaven to place thee; seek not the flowing stream and the salt ocean; and if, some clear night, a star finds room to mirror itself in thy little stagnant world, shining through the fat weeds and slime that almost shut out the heavens, pray be careful not to pay too much heed to the high-born luminary. Look to your wriggling; that is your proper business. An animalcule that does not wriggle must be morbid or peculiar. All will tender, in different forms of varying elegance, the safe and simple admonition: 'Wriggle and be damned to you!'"

* * * * *

It was at this somewhat fevered moment, that Hubert Temperley appeared, once more, upon the scene. Hadria was with her mother, taking tea at Drumgarren, when Mrs. Gordon, catching the sounds of carriage wheels, announced that she was expecting Hubert and his sister for a visit. In another second, the travellers were in the drawing-room.

Hubert's self-possession was equal to the occasion. He introduced his sister to Mrs. Fullerton and Hadria. Miss Temperley was his junior by a year; a slight, neatly-built young woman, with a sort of tact that went on brilliantly up to a certain point, and then suddenly collapsed altogether. She had her brother's self-complacency, and an air of encouragement which Mrs. Gordon seemed to find most gratifying.

She dressed perfectly, in quiet Parisian fashion. Hadria saw that her brother had taken her into his confidence, or she concluded so from something in Miss Temperley's manner. The latter treated Hadria with a certain familiarity, as if she had known her for some time, and she had a way of seeming to take her apart, when addressing her, as if there were a sort of understanding between them. It was here that her instinct failed her; for she seemed unaware that this assumption of an intimacy that did not exist was liable to be resented, and that it might be unpleasant to be expected to catch special remarks sent over the heads of the others, although ostensibly for the common weal.

Hadria thought that she had never seen so strange a contrast as this young woman's behaviour, within and without the circle of her perceptions. It was the more remarkable, since her mind was bent upon the details and niceties of conduct, and the nuances of existence.

"I shall come and see you as soon as I can," she promised, when Mrs. Fullerton rose to leave.

Miss Temperley kept her word. She was charmed with the old house, praising authoritatively.

"This is an excellent piece of carving; far superior to the one in the dining-room. Ah, yes, that is charming; so well arranged. You ought to have a touch of blue there to make it perfect."

Hubert shewed good taste in keeping away from Dunaghee, except to pay his call on Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton.

"Hadria," said his sister, "I am going to call you by your pretty Christian name, and I want you to call me Henriette. I feel I have known you much longer than ten days, because Hubert has told me so much about you, and your music. You play charmingly. So much native talent. You want good training, of course; but you really might become a brilliant performer. Hubert is quite distressed that you should not enjoy more advantages. I should like so much if you could come and stay with us in town, and have some good lessons. Do think of it."

Hadria flushed. "Oh, thank you, I could not do that—I——"

"I understand you, dear Hadria," said Henriette, drawing her chair closer to the fire. "You know, Hubert can never keep anything of great importance from me." She looked arch.

Hadria muttered something that might have discouraged a less persistent spirit, but Miss Temperley paid no attention.

"Poor Hubert! I have had to be a ministering angel to him during these last months."

"Why do you open up this subject, Miss Temperley?"

"Henriette, if you please," cried that young woman, with the air of a playful potentate who has requested a favoured courtier to drop the ceremonious "Your Majesty" in private conversation.

"It was I who made him accept Mrs. Gordon's invitation. He very nearly refused it. He feared that it would be unpleasant for you. But I insisted on his coming. Why should he not? He would like so much to come here more often, but again he fears to displease you. He is not a Temperley for nothing. They are not of the race of fools who rush in where angels fear to tread."

"Are they not?" asked Hadria absently.

"We both see your difficulty," Miss Temperley went on. "Hubert would not so misunderstand you—the dear fellow is full of delicacy—and I should dearly love to hear him play to your accompaniment; he used to enjoy those practices so much. Would you think him intrusive if he brought his 'cello some afternoon?"

Hadria, not without an uneasy qualm, agreed to the suggestion, though by no means cordially.

Accordingly brother and sister arrived, one afternoon, for the practice. Henriette took the leadership, visibly employed tact and judgment, talked a great deal, and was surprisingly delicate, as beseemed a Temperley. Hadria found the occasion somewhat trying nevertheless, and Hubert stumbled, at first, in his playing. In a few minutes, however, both musicians became possessed by the music, and then all went well. Henriette sat in an easy chair and listened critically. Now and then she would call out "bravo," or "admirable," and when the performance was over, she was warm in her congratulations.

Hadria was flushed with the effort and pleasure of the performance.

"I never heard Hubert's playing to such advantage," said his sister. "I seem to hear it for the first time. You really ought to practise together often." Another afternoon was appointed; Henriette left Hadria almost no choice.

After the next meeting, the constraint had a little worn off, and the temptation to continue the practising was very strong. Henriette's presence was reassuring. And then Hubert seemed so reasonable, and had apparently put the past out of his mind altogether.

After the practice, brother and sister would linger a little in the drawing-room, chatting. Hubert appeared to advantage in his sister's society. She had a way of striking his best vein. Her own talent ran with his, appealed to it, and created the conditions for its display. Her presence and inspiration seemed to produce, on his ability, a sort of cumulative effect. Henriette set all the familiar machinery in motion; pressed the right button, and her brother became brilliant.

A slight touch of diffidence in his manner softened the effect of his usual complacency. Hadria liked him better than she had liked him on his previous visit. His innate refinement appealed to her powerfully. Moreover, he was cultivated and well-read, and his society was agreeable. Oh, why did this everlasting matrimonial idea come in and spoil everything? Why could not men and women have interests in common, without wishing instantly to plunge into a condition of things which hampered and crippled them so miserably?

Hadria was disposed to underrate all defects, and to make the most of all virtues in Hubert, at the present moment. He had come at just the right time to make a favourable impression upon her; for the loneliness of her life had begun to leave its mark, and to render her extremely sensitive to influence.

She was an alien among the people of her circle; and she felt vaguely guilty in failing to share their ideas and ambitions. Their glances, their silences, conveyed a world of cold surprise and condemnation.

Hubert was tolerance itself compared with the majority of her associates. She felt almost as if he had done her a personal kindness when he omitted to look astonished at her remarks, or to ignore them as "awkward."

Yet she felt uneasy about this renewal of the practices, and tried to avoid them as often as possible, though sorely against her inclination. They were so great a relief and enjoyment. Her inexperience, and her carelessness of conventional standards, put her somewhat off her guard. Hubert showed no signs of even remembering the interview of last year, that had been cut short by her father's entrance. Why should she insist on keeping it in mind? It was foolish. Moreover she had been expressly given to understand, in a most pointed manner, that her conduct would not be misinterpreted if she allowed him to come occasionally.

From several remarks that Temperley made, she saw that he too regarded the ordinary domestic existence with distaste. It offended his fastidiousness. He was fastidious to his finger-tips. It amused Hadria to note the contrast between him and Mr. Gordon, who was a typical father of a family; limited in his interests to that circle; an amiable ruler of a tiny, somewhat absurd little world, pompous and important and inconceivably dull.

The bourgeois side of this life was evidently displeasing to Hubert. Good taste was his fetish. From his remarks about women, Hadria was led to observe how subtly critical he was with regard to feminine qualities, and wondered if his preference for herself ought to be regarded as a great compliment.

Henriette congratulated her on having been admired by the fastidious Hubert.

"Let us hope it speaks well for me," Hadria replied with a cynical smile, "but I have so often noticed that men who are very difficult to please, choose for the domestic hearth the most dreary and unattractive woman of their acquaintance! I sometimes doubt if men ever do marry the women they most admire."

"They do, when they can win them," said Henriette.



CHAPTER XIV.

During Henriette's visit, one of the meetings of the Preposterous Society fell due, and she expressed a strong wish to be present. She also craved the privilege of choosing the subject of discussion. Finally, she received a formal request from the members to give the lecture herself. She was full of enthusiasm about the Society (such an educating influence!), and prepared her paper with great care. There had been a tendency among the circle, to politely disagree with Henriette. Her ideas respecting various burning topics were at variance with the trend of opinion at Dunaghee, and Miss Temperley was expected to take this opportunity of enlightening the family. The family was equally resolved not to be enlightened.

"I have chosen for my subject to-night," said the lecturer, "one that is beginning to occupy public attention very largely: I mean the sphere of woman in society."

The audience, among whom Hubert had been admitted at his sister's earnest request, drew themselves together, and a little murmur of battle ran along the line. Henriette's figure, in her well-fitting Parisian gown, looked singularly out of place in the garret, with the crazy old candle-holder beside her, the yellow flame of the candle flinging fantastic shadows on the vaulted roof, preposterously distorting her neat form, as if in wicked mockery. The moonlight streamed in, as usual on the nights chosen by the Society for their meetings.

Henriette's paper was neatly expressed, and its sentiments were admirable. She maintained a perfect balance between the bigotry of the past and the violence of the present. Her phrases seemed to rock, like a pair of scales, from excess to excess, on either side. She came to rest in the exact middle. This led to the Johnsonian structure, or, as Hadria afterwards said, to the style of a Times leading article: "While we remember on the one hand, we must not forget on the other——"

At the end of the lecture, the audience found themselves invited to sympathize cautiously and circumspectly with the advancement of women, but led, at the same time, to conclude that good taste and good feeling forbade any really nice woman from moving a little finger to attain, or to help others to attain, the smallest fraction more of freedom, or an inch more of spiritual territory, than was now enjoyed by her sex. When, at some future time, wider privileges should have been conquered by the exertions of someone else, then the really nice woman could saunter in and enjoy the booty. But till then, let her leave boisterous agitation to others, and endear herself to all around her by her patience and her loving self-sacrifice.

"That pays better for the present," Hadria was heard to mutter to an adjacent member.

The lecturer, in her concluding remarks, gave a smile of ineffable sweetness, sadly marred, however, by the grotesque effect of the flickering shadows that were cast on her face by the candle. After all, duty not right was the really important matter, and the lecturer thought that it would be better if one heard the former word rather oftener in connection with the woman's question, and the latter word rather more seldom. Then, with new sweetness, and in a tone not to be described, she went on to speak of the natural responsibilities and joys of her sex, drawing a moving, if somewhat familiar picture of those avocations, than which she was sure there could be nothing higher or holier.

For some not easily explained cause, the construction of this sentence gave it a peculiar unctuous force: "than which," as Fred afterwards remarked, "would have bowled over any but the most hardened sinner."

For weeks after this memorable lecture, if any very lofty altitude had to be ascended in conversational excursions, the aspirant invariably smiled with ineffable tenderness and lightly scaled the height, murmuring "than which" to a vanquished audience.

The lecture was followed by a discussion that rather took the stiffness out of Miss Temperley's phrases. The whole party was roused. Algitha had to whisper a remonstrance to the boys, for their solemn questions were becoming too preposterous. The lecture was discussed with much warmth. There was a tendency to adopt the form "than which" with some frequency. Bursts of laughter startled a company of rats in the wainscoting, and there was a lively scamper behind the walls. No obvious opposition was offered. Miss Temperley's views were examined with gravity, and indeed in a manner almost pompous. But by the end of that trying process, they had a sadly bedraggled and plucked appearance, much to their parent's bewilderment. She endeavoured to explain further, and was met by guilelessly intelligent questions, which had the effect of depriving the luckless objects of their solitary remaining feather. The members of the society continued to pine for information, and Miss Temperley endeavoured to provide it, till late into the night. The discussion finally drifted on to dangerous ground. Algitha declared that she considered that no man had any just right to ask a woman to pledge herself to love him and live with him for the rest of her life. How could she? Hubert suggested that the woman made the same claim on the man.

"Which is equally absurd," said Algitha. "Just as if any two people, when they are beginning to form their characters, could possibly be sure of their sentiments for the rest of their days. They have no business to marry at such an age. They are bound to alter."

"But they must regard it as their duty not to alter with regard to one another," said Henriette.

"Quite so; just as they ought to regard it as their duty among other things, not to grow old," suggested Fred.

"Then, Algitha, do you mean that they may fall in love elsewhere?" Ernest inquired.

"They very likely will do so, if they make such an absurd start," Algitha declared.

"And if they do?"

"Then, if the sentiment stands test and trial, and proves genuine, and not a silly freak, the fact ought to be frankly faced. Husband and wife have no business to go on keeping up a bond that has become false and irksome."

Miss Temperley broke into protest. "But surely you don't mean to defend such faithlessness."

Algitha would not admit that it was faithlessness. She said it was mere honesty. She could see nothing inherently wrong in falling in love genuinely after one arrived at years of discretion. She thought it inherently idiotic, and worse, to make a choice that ought to be for life, at years of indiscretion. Still, people were idiotic, and that must be considered, as well as all the other facts, such as the difficulty of really knowing each other before marriage, owing to social arrangements, and also owing to the training, which made men and women always pose so ridiculously towards one another, pretending to be something that they were not.

"Well done, Algitha," cried Ernest, laughing; "I like to hear you speak out. Now tell me frankly: supposing you married quite young, before you had had much experience; supposing you afterwards found that you and your husband had both been deceiving yourselves and each other, unconsciously perhaps; and suppose, when more fully awakened and developed, you met another fellow and fell in love with him genuinely, what would you do?"

"Oh, she would just mention it to her husband casually," Fred interposed with a chuckle, "and disappear."

"I should certainly not go through terrific emotions and self-accusations, and think the end of the world had come," said Algitha serenely. "I should calmly face the situation."

"Calmly! She by supposition being madly in love!" ejaculated Fred, with a chuckle.

"Calmly," repeated Algitha. "And I should consider carefully what would be best for all concerned. If I decided, after mature consideration and self-testing, that I ought to leave my husband, I should leave him, as I should hope he would leave me, in similar circumstances. That is my idea of right."

"And is this also your idea of right, Miss Fullerton?" asked Temperley, turning, in some trepidation, to Hadria.

"That seems to me right in the abstract. One can't pronounce for particular cases where circumstances are entangled."

Hubert sank back in his chair, and ran his hand over his brow. He seemed about to speak, but he checked himself.

"Where did you get such extraordinary ideas from?" cried Miss Temperley.

"They were like Topsy; they growed," said Fred.

"We have been in the habit of speculating freely on all subjects," said Ernest, "ever since we could talk. This is the blessed result!"

"I am not quite so sure now, that the Preposterous Society meets with my approval," observed Miss Temperley.

"If you had been brought up in the bosom of this Society, Miss Temperley, you too, perhaps, would have come to this. Think of it!"

"Does your mother know what sort of subjects you discuss?"

There was a shout of laughter. "Mother used often to come into the nursery and surprise us in hot discussion on the origin of evil," said Hadria.

"Don't you believe what she says, Miss Temperley," cried Fred; "mother never could teach Hadria the most rudimentary notions of accuracy."

"Her failure with my brothers, was in the department of manners," Hadria observed.

"Then she does not know what you talk about?" persisted Henriette.

"You ask her," prompted Fred, with undisguised glee.

"She never attends our meetings," said Algitha.

"Well, well, I cannot understand it!" cried Miss Temperley. "However, you don't quite know what you are talking about, and one mustn't blame you."

"No, don't," urged Fred; "we are a sensitive family."

"Shut up!" cried Ernest with a warning frown.

"Oh, you are a coarse-grained exception; I speak of the family average," Fred answered with serenity.

Henriette felt that nothing more could be done with this strange audience. Her business was really with the President of the Society. The girl was bent on ruining her life with these wild notions. Miss Temperley decided that it would be better to talk to Hadria quietly in her own room, away from the influence of these eccentric brothers and that extraordinary sister. After all, it was Algitha who had originated the shocking view, not Hadria, who had merely agreed, doubtless out of a desire to support her sister.

"I have not known you for seven years, but I am going to poke your fire," said Henriette, when they were established in Hadria's room.

"I never thought you would wait so long as that," was Hadria's ambiguous reply.

Then Henriette opened her batteries. She talked without interruption, her companion listening, agreeing occasionally with her adversary, in a disconcerting manner; then falling into silence.

"It seems to me that you are making a very terrible mistake in your life, Hadria. You have taken up a fixed idea about domestic duties and all that, and are going to throw away your chances of forming a happy home of your own, out of a mere prejudice. You may not admire Mrs. Gordon's existence; for my part I think she leads a very good, useful life, but there is no reason why all married lives should be like hers."

"Why are they, then?"

"I don't see that they are."

"It is the prevailing type. It shows the way the domestic wind blows. Fancy having to be always resisting such a wind. What an oblique, shorn-looking object one would be after a few years!"

Henriette grew eloquent. She recalled instances of women who had fulfilled all their home duties, and been successful in other walks as well; she drew pictures in attractive colours of Hadria in a home of her own, with far more liberty than was possible under her parents' roof; and then she drew another picture of Hadria fifteen years hence at Dunaghee.

Hadria covered her face with her hands. "You who uphold all these social arrangements, how do you feel when you find yourself obliged to urge me to marry, not for the sake of the positive joys of domestic existence, but for the merely negative advantage of avoiding a hapless and forlorn state? You propose it as a pis-aller. Does that argue that all is sound in the state of Denmark?"

"If you had not this unreasonable objection to what is really a woman's natural destiny, the difficulty would not exist."

"Have women no pride?"

Henriette did not answer.

"Have they no sense of dignity? If one marries (accepting things on the usual basis, of course) one gives to another person rights and powers over one's life that are practically boundless. To retain one's self-direction in case of dispute would be possible only on pain of social ruin. I have little enough freedom now, heaven knows; but if I married, why my very thoughts would become the property of another. Thought, emotion, love itself, must pass under the yoke! There would be no nook or corner entirely and indisputably my own."

"I should not regard that as a hardship," said Henriette, "if I loved my husband."

"I should consider it not only a hardship, but beyond endurance."

"But, my dear, you are impracticable."

"That is what I think domestic life is!" Hadria's quiet tone was suddenly changed to one of scorn. "You talk of love; what has love worthy of the name to do with this preposterous interference with the freedom of another person? If that is what love means—the craving to possess and restrain and demand and hamper and absorb, and generally make mincemeat of the beloved object, then preserve me from the master-passion."

Henriette was baffled. "I don't know how to make you see this in a truer light," she said. "There is something to my mind so beautiful in the close union of two human beings, who pledge themselves to love and honour one another, to face life hand in hand, to share every thought, every hope, to renounce each his own wishes for the sake of the other."

"That sounds very elevating; in practice it breeds Mr. and Mrs. Gordon."

"Do you mean to tell me you will never marry on this account?"

"I would never marry anyone who would exact the usual submissions and renunciations, or even desire them, which I suppose amounts almost to saying that I shall never marry at all. What man would endure a wife who demanded to retain her absolute freedom, as in the case of a close friendship? The man is not born!"

"You seem to forget, dear Hadria, in objecting to place yourself under the yoke, as you call it, that your husband would also be obliged to resign part of his independence to you. The prospect of loss of liberty in marriage often prevents a man from marrying ("Wise man!" ejaculated Hadria), so you see the disadvantage is not all on one side, if so you choose to consider it."

"Good heavens! do you think that the opportunity to interfere with another person would console me for being interfered with myself? I don't want my share of the constraining power. I would as soon accept the lash of a slave-driver. This moral lash is almost more odious than the other, for its thongs are made of the affections and the domestic 'virtues,' than which there can be nothing sneakier or more detestable!"

Henriette heaved a discouraged sigh. "You are wrong, my dear Hadria," she said emphatically; "you are wrong, wrong, wrong."

"How? why?"

"One can't have everything in this life. You must be willing to resign part of your privileges for the sake of the far greater privileges that you acquire."

"I can imagine nothing that would compensate for the loss of freedom, the right to oneself."

"What about love?" murmured Henriette.

"Love!" echoed Hadria scornfully. "Do you suppose I could ever love a man who had the paltry, ungenerous instinct to enchain me?"

"Why use such extreme terms? Love does not enchain."

"Exactly what I contend," interrupted Hadria.

"But naturally husband and wife have claims."

"Naturally. I have just been objecting to them in what you describe as extreme terms."

"But I mean, when people care for one another, it is a joy to them to acknowledge ties and obligations of affection."

"Ah! one knows what that euphemism means!"

"Pray what does it mean?"

"That the one serious endeavour in the life of married people is to be able to call each other's souls their own."

Henriette stared.

"My language may not be limpid."

"Oh, I see what you mean. I was only wondering who can have taught you all these strange ideas."

Hadria at length gave way to a laugh that had been threatening for some time.

"My mother," she observed simply.

Henriette gave it up.



CHAPTER XV.

The family had reassembled for the New Year's festivities. The change in Algitha since her departure from home was striking. She was gentler, more affectionate to her parents, than of yore. The tendency to grow hard and fretful had entirely disappeared. The sense of self was obviously lessened with the need for self-defence. Hadria discovered that an attachment was springing up between her sister and Wilfrid Burton, about whom she wrote so frequently, and that this development of her emotional nature, united with her work, had given a glowing centre to her life which showed itself in a thousand little changes of manner and thought. Hadria told her sister that she felt herself unreal and fanciful in her presence. "I go twirling things round and round in my head till I grow dizzy. But you compare ideas with fact; you even turn ideas into fact; while I can get no hold on fact at all. Thoughts rise as mists rise from the river, but nothing happens. I feel them begin to prey upon me, working inwards."

Algitha shook her head. "It is a mad world," she said. "Week after week goes by, and there seems no lifting of the awful darkness in which the lives of these millions are passed. We want workers by the thousand. Yet, as if in mockery, the Devil keeps these well-fed thousands eating their hearts out in idleness or artificial occupations till they become diseased merely for want of something to do. Then," added Algitha, "His Majesty marries them, and sets them to work to create another houseful of idle creatures, who have to be supported by the deathly toil of those who labour too much."

"The devil is full of resources!" said Hadria.

Miss Temperley had been asked to stay at Dunaghee for the New Year. Algitha conceived for her a sentiment almost vindictive. Hadria and the boys enjoyed nothing better than to watch Miss Temperley giving forth her opinions, while Algitha's figure gradually stiffened and her neck drew out, as Fred said, in truly telescopic fashion, like that of Alice in Wonderland. The boys constructed a figure of cushions, stuffed into one of Algitha's old gowns, the neck being a padded broom-handle, made to work up and down at pleasure; and with this counterfeit presentment of their sister, they used to act the scene amidst shouts of applause, Miss Temperley entering, on one occasion, when the improvised cocoa-nut head had reached its culminating point of high disdain, somewhere about the level of the curtain-poles.

On New-Year's-eve, Dunaghee was full of guests. There was to be a children's party, to which however most of the grown-up neighbours were also invited.

"What a charming sight!" cried Henriette, standing with her neat foot on the fender in the hall, where the children were playing blind man's buff.

Mrs. Fullerton sat watching them with a dreamy smile. The scene recalled many an old memory. Mr. Fullerton was playing with the children.

Everyone remarked how well the two girls looked in their new evening gowns. They had made them themselves, in consequence of a wager with Fred, who had challenged them to combine pink and green satisfactorily.

"The gowns are perfect!" Temperley ventured to remark. "So much distinction!"

"All my doing," cried Fred. "I chose the colours."

"Distinction comes from within," said Temperley. "I should like to see what sort of gown in pink and green Mrs. ——." He stopped short abruptly.

Fred gave a chuckle. Indiscreet eyes wandered towards Mrs. Gordon's brocade and silver.

Later in the evening, that lady played dance music in a florid manner, resembling her taste in dress. The younger children had gone home, and the hall was filled with spinning couples.

"I hope we are to have some national dances," said Miss Temperley. "My brother and I are both looking forward to seeing a true reel danced by natives of the country."

"Oh, certainly!" said Mr. Fullerton. "My daughters are rather celebrated for their reels, especially Hadria." Mr. Fullerton executed a step or two with great agility.

"The girl gets quite out of herself when she is dancing," said Mrs. Fullerton. "She won't be scolded about it, for she says she takes after her father!"

"That's the time to get round her," observed Fred. "If we want to set her up to some real fun, we always play a reel and wait till she's well into the spirit of the thing, and then, I'll wager, she would stick at nothing."

"It's a fact," added Ernest. "It really seems to half mesmerise her."

"How very curious!" cried Miss Temperley.

She and her brother found themselves watching the dancing a little apart from the others.

"I would try again to-night, Hubert," she said in a low voice.

He was silent for a moment, twirling the tassel of the curtain.

"There is nothing to be really alarmed at in her ideas, regrettable as they are. She is young. That sort of thing will soon wear off after she is married."

Temperley flung away the tassel.

"She doesn't know what she is talking about. These high-flown lectures and discussions have filled all their heads with nonsense. It will have to be rooted out when they come to face the world. No use to oppose her now. Nothing but experience will teach her. She must just be humoured for the present. They have all run a little wild in their notions. Time will cure that."

"I am sure of it," said Hubert tolerantly. "They don't know the real import of what they say." He hugged this sentence with satisfaction.

"They are like the young Russians one reads about in Turgenieff's novels," said Henriette—"all ideas, no common-sense."

"And you really believe——?"

Henriette's hand was laid comfortingly on her brother's arm.

"Dear Hubert, I know something of my sex. After a year of married life, a woman has too many cares and responsibilities to trouble about ideas of this kind, or of any other."

"She strikes me as being somewhat persistent by nature," said Hubert, choosing a gentler word than obstinate to describe the quality in the lady of his affections.

"Let her be as persistent as she may, it is not possible for any woman to resist the laws and beliefs of Society. What can she do against all the world? She can't escape from the conditions of her epoch. Oh! she may talk boldly now, for she does not understand; she is a mere infant as regards knowledge of the world, but once a wife——"

Henriette smiled and shook her head, by way of finish to her sentence. Hubert mused silently for some minutes.

"I could not endure that there should be any disturbance—any eccentricity—in our life——"

"My dear boy, if you don't trust to the teaching of experience to cure Hadria of these fantastic notions, rely upon the resistless persuasions of our social facts and laws. Nothing can stand against them—certainly not the fretful heresies of an inexperienced girl, who, remember, is really good and kind at heart."

"Ah! yes," cried Hubert; "a fine nature, full of good instincts, and womanly to her finger-tips."

"Oh! if she were not that, I would never encourage you to think of her," cried Henriette with a shudder. "It is on this essential goodness of heart that I rely. She would never be able, try as she might, to act in a manner that would really distress those who were dear to her. You may count upon that securely."

"Yes; I am sure of it," said Hubert, "but unluckily" (he shook his head and sighed) "I am not among those who are dear to her."

He rose abruptly, and Henriette followed him.

"Try to win her to-night," she murmured, "and be sure to express no opposition to her ideas, however wild they may be. Ignore them, humour her, plead your cause once more on this auspicious day—the last of the old year. Something tells me that the new year will begin joyously for you. Go now, and good luck to you."

"Ah! here you are," cried Mr. Fullerton, "we were wondering what had become of you. You said you wished to see a reel. Mrs. McPherson is so good as to play for us."

The kindly old Scottish dame had come, with two nieces, from a distance of ten miles.

A thrill ran through the company when the strange old tune began. Everyone rushed for a partner, and two long rows of figures stood facing one another, eager to start. Temperley asked Hadria to dance with him. Algitha had Harold Wilkins for a partner. The two long rows were soon stepping and twirling with zest and agility. A new and wilder spirit began to possess the whole party. The northern blood took fire and transfigured the dancers. The Temperleys seemed to be fashioned of different clay; they were able to keep their heads. Several elderly people had joined in the dance, performing their steps with a conscientious dexterity that put some of their juniors to shame. Mr. Fullerton stood by, looking on and applauding.

"How your father seems to enjoy the sight!" said Temperley, as he met his partner for a moment.

"He likes nothing so well, and his daughters take after him."

Hadria's reels were celebrated, not without reason. Some mad spirit seemed to possess her. It would appear almost as if she had passed into a different phase of character. She lost caution and care and the sense of external events.

When the dance was ended, Hubert led her from the hall. She went as if in a dream. She would not allow herself to be taken beyond the sound of the grotesque old dance music that was still going on, but otherwise she was unresisting.

He sat down beside her in a corner of the dining-room. Now and then he glanced at his companion, and seemed about to speak. "You seem fond of your national music," he at last remarked.

"It fills me with bewildering memories," she said in a dreamy tone. "It seems to recall—it eludes description—some wild, primitive experiences—mountains, mists—I can't express what northern mysteries. It seems almost as if I had lived before, among some ancient Celtic people, and now, when I hear their music—or sometimes when I hear the sound of wind among the pines—whiffs and gusts of something intensely familiar return to me, and I cannot grasp it. It is very bewildering."

"The only thing that happens to me of the kind is that curious sense of having done a thing before. Strange to say, I feel it now. This moment is not new to me."

Hadria gave a startled glance at her companion, and shuddered.

"I suppose it is all pre-ordained," she said. He was puzzled, but more hopeful than usual. Hadria might almost have accepted him in sheer absence of mind. He put the thought in different terms. He began to speak more boldly. He gave his view of life and happiness, his philosophy and religion. Hadria lazily agreed. She lay under a singular spell. The bizarre old music smote still upon the ear. She felt as if she were in the thrall of some dream whose events followed one another, as the scenes of a moving panorama unfold themselves before the spectators. Temperley began to plead his cause. Hadria, with a startled look in her eyes, tried to check him. But her will refused to issue a vigorous command. Even had he been hateful to her, which he certainly was not, she felt that she would have been unable to wake out of the nightmare, and resume the conduct of affairs. The sense of the importance of personal events had entirely disappeared. What did it all matter? "Over us stars and under us graves." The graves would put it all right some day. As for attempting to direct one's fate, and struggle out of the highways of the world—midsummer madness! It was not only the Mrs. Gordons, but the Valeria Du Prels who told one so. Everybody said (but in discreeter terms), "Disguise from yourself the solitude by setting up little screens of affections, and little pompous affairs about which you must go busily, and with all the solemnity that you can muster."

The savage builds his mud hut to shelter him from the wind and the rain and the terror of the beyond. Outside is the wilderness ready to engulf him. Rather than be left alone at the mercy of elemental things, with no little hut, warm and dark and stuffy, to shelter one, a woman will sacrifice everything—liberty, ambition, health, power, her very dignity. There was a letter in Hadria's pocket at this moment, eloquently protesting in favour of the mud hut.

Hadria must have been appearing to listen favourably to Temperley's pleading, for he said eagerly, "Then I have not spoken this time quite in vain. I may hope that perhaps some day——"

"Some day," repeated Hadria, passing her hand across her eyes. "It doesn't really matter. I mean we make too much fuss about these trifles; don't you think so?" She spoke dreamily. The music was jigging on with strange merriment.

"To me it matters very much indeed. I don't consider it a trifle," said Temperley, in some bewilderment.

"Oh, not to ourselves. But of what importance are we?"

"None at all, in a certain sense," Temperley admitted; "but in another sense we are all important. I cannot help being intensely personal at this moment. I can't help grasping at the hope of happiness. Hadria, it lies in your hand. Won't you be generous?"

She gave a distressed gesture, and seemed to make some vain effort, as when the victim of a nightmare struggles to overcome the paralysis that holds him.

"Then I may hope a little, Hadria—I must hope."

Still the trance seemed to hold her enthralled. The music was diabolically merry. She could fancy evil spirits tripping to it in swarms around her. They seemed to point at her, and wave their arms around her, and from them came an influence, magnetic in its quality, that forbade her to resist. All had been pre-arranged. Nothing could avert it. She seemed to be waiting rather than acting. Against her inner judgment, she had allowed those accursed practices to go on. Against her instinct, she had permitted Henriette to become intimate at Dunaghee; indeed it would have been hard to avoid it, for Miss Temperley was not easy to discourage. Why had she assured Hadria so pointedly that Hubert would not misinterpret her consent to renew the practices? Was it not a sort of treachery? Had not Henriette, with her larger knowledge of the world, been perfectly well aware that whatever might be said, the renewal of the meetings would be regarded as encouragement? Did she not know that Hadria herself would feel implicated by the concession?

Temperley's long silence had been misleading. The danger had crept up insidiously. And had she not been treacherous to herself? She had longed for companionship, for music, for something to break the strain of her wild, lonely life. Knowing, or rather half-divining the risk, she had allowed herself to accept the chance of relief when it came. Lack of experience had played a large part in the making of to-night's dilemma. Hadria's own strange mood was another ally to her lover, and for that, old Mrs. McPherson and her reels were chiefly responsible. Of such flimsy trifles is the human fate often woven.

"Tell me, did you ask your sister to——?"

"No, no," Hubert interposed. "My sister knows of my hopes, and is anxious that I should succeed."

"I thought that she was helping you."

"She would take any legitimate means to help me," said Hubert. "You cannot resent that. Ah, Hadria, why will you not listen to me?" He bent forward, covering his face with his hands in deep dejection. His hope had begun to wane.

"You know what I think," said Hadria. "You know how I should act if I married. Surely that ought to cure you of all——."

He seized her hand.

"No, no, nothing that you may think could cure me of the hope of making you my wife. I care for what you are, not for what you think. You know how little I cling to the popular version of the domestic story. I have told you over and over again that it offends me in a thousand ways. I hate the bourgeois element in it. What have we really to disagree about?"

He managed to be very convincing. He shewed that for a woman, life in her father's house is far less free than in her own home; that existence could be moulded to any shape she pleased. If Hadria hesitated only on this account her last reason was gone. It was not fair to him. He had been patient. He had kept silence for many months. But he could endure the suspense no longer. He took her hand. Then suddenly she rose.

"No, no. I can't, I can't," she cried desperately.

"I will not listen to denial," he said following her. "I cannot stand a second disappointment. You have allowed me to hope."

"How? When? Never!" she exclaimed.

"Ah, yes, Hadria. I am older than you and I have more experience. Do you think a man will cease to hope while he continues to see the woman he loves?"

Hadria turned very pale.

"You seemed to have forgotten—your sister assured me—Ah, it was treacherous, it was cruel. She took advantage of my ignorance, my craving for companionship."

"No, it is you who are cruel, Hadria, to make such accusations. I do not claim the slightest consideration because you permitted those practices. But you cannot suppose that my feeling has not been confirmed and strengthened since I have seen you again. Why should you turn from me? Why may I not hope to win you? If you have no repugnance to me, why should not I have a chance? Hadria, Hadria, answer me, for heaven's sake. Oh, if I could only understand what is in your mind!"

She would have found it a hard task to enlighten him. He had succeeded, to some extent, in lulling her fears, not in banishing them, for a sinister dread still muttered its warning beneath the surface thoughts.

The strength of Temperley's emotion had stirred her. The magic of personal influence had begun to tell upon her. It was so hard not to believe when someone insisted with such certainty, with such obvious sincerity, that everything would be right. He seemed so confident that she could make him happy, strange as it appeared. Perhaps after all——? And what a release from the present difficulties. But could one trust? A confused mass of feeling struggled together. A temptation to give the answer that would cause pleasure was very strong, and beneath all lurked a trembling hope that perhaps this was the way of escape. In apparent contradiction to this, or to any other hope, lay a sense of fatality, a sad indifference, interrupted at moments by flashes of very desperate caring, when suddenly the love of life, the desire for happiness and experience, for the exercise of her power, for its use in the service of her generation, became intense, and then faded away again, as obstacles presented their formidable array before the mind. In the midst of the confusion the thought of the Professor hovered vaguely, with a dim distressing sense of something wrong, of something within her lost and wretched and forlorn.

Mrs. Fullerton passed through the room on the arm of Mr. Gordon. How delighted her mother would be if she were to give up this desperate attempt to hold out against her appointed fate. What if her mother and Mrs. Gordon and all the world were perfectly right and far-seeing and wise? Did it not seem more likely, on the face of it, that they should be right, considering the enormous majority of those who would agree with them, than that she, Hadria, a solitary girl, unsupported by knowledge of life or by fellow-believers, should have chanced upon the truth? Had only Valeria been on her side, she would have felt secure, but Valeria was dead against her.

"We are not really at variance, believe me," Temperley pleaded. "You state things rather more strongly than I do—a man used to knocking about the world—but I don't believe there is any radical difference between us." He worked himself up into the belief that there never were two human beings so essentially at one, on all points, as he and Hadria.

"Do you remember the debate that evening in the garret? Do you remember the sentiments that scared your sister so much?" she asked.

Temperley remembered.

"Well, I don't hold those sentiments merely for amusement and recreation. I mean them. I should not hesitate a moment to act upon them. If things grew intolerable, according to my view of things, I should simply go away, though twenty marriage-services had been read over my head. Neither Algitha nor I have any of the notions that restrain women in these matters. We would brook no such bonds. The usual claims and demands we would neither make nor submit to. You heard Algitha speak very plainly on the matter. So you see, we are entirely unsuitable as wives, except to the impossible men who might share our rebellion. Please let us go back to the hall. They are just beginning to dance another reel."

"I cannot let you go back. Oh, Hadria, you can't be so unjust as to force me to break off in this state of uncertainty. Just give me a word of hope, however slight, and I will be satisfied."

Hadria looked astonished. "Have you really taken in what I have just said?"

"Every word of it."

"And you realise that I mean it, mean it, with every fibre of me."

"I understand; and I repeat that I shall not be happy until you are my wife. Have what ideas you please, only be my wife."

She gazed at him in puzzled scrutiny. "You don't think I am really in earnest. Let us go."

"I know you are in earnest," he cried, eagerly following her, "and still I——"

At that moment Harold Wilkins came up to claim Hadria for a promised dance. Temperley gave a gesture of impatience. But Harold insisted, and Hadria walked with her partner into the hall where Mrs. Gordon was now playing a sentimental waltz, with considerable poetic license as to time. As everyone said: Mrs. Gordon played with so much expression.

Temperley stood about in corners watching Hadria. She was flushed and silent, dancing with a still gliding movement under the skilful guidance of her partner.

Temperley tried to win a glance as she passed round, but her eyes were resolutely fixed on the floor.

Algitha followed her sister's movements uneasily. She had noticed her absence during the last reel, and observed that Temperley also was not to be seen. She felt anxious. She knew Hadria's emotional susceptibility. She knew Temperley's convincing faculty, and also Hadria's uneasy feeling that she had done wrong in allowing the practices to be resumed.

Henriette had not failed to notice the signs of the times, and she annoyed Algitha beyond endurance by her obviously sisterly manner of addressing the family. She had taken to calling the boys by their first names.

Fred shared his sister's dislike to Henriette. "Tact!" he cried with a snort, "why a Temperley rushes in where a bull in a china-shop would fear to tread!"

Algitha saw that Hubert was again by Hadria's side before the evening was out. The latter looked white, and she avoided her sister's glance. This last symptom seemed to Algitha the worst.

"What's the matter with Hadria?" asked Fred, "she will scarcely speak to me. I was just telling her the best joke I've heard this year, and, will you believe me, she didn't see the point! Yes, you may well stare! I tried again and she gave a nervous giggle; I am relating to you the exact truth. Do any of the epidemics come on like that?"

"Yes, one of the worst," said Algitha gloomily. Fred glared enquiry.

"I am afraid she has been led into accepting Hubert Temperley."

Fred opened his mouth and breathed deep. "Stuff! Hadria would as soon think of selling her soul to the devil."

"Oh, she is quite capable of that too," said Algitha, shaking her head.

"Well, I'm blowed," cried Fred.

Not long after this, the guests began to disperse. Mrs. Gordon and her party were among the last to leave, having a shorter distance to go.

Hubert Temperley was quiet and self-possessed, but Algitha felt sure that she detected a look of suppressed exultation in his demeanour, and something odiously brotherly in his mode of bidding them all good-night.

When everyone had left, and the family were alone, they gathered round the hall fire for a final chat, before dispersing for the night.

"What a delightful evening we have had, Mrs. Fullerton," said Miss Temperley. "It was most picturesque and characteristic. I shall always remember the charm and kindliness of Scottish hospitality."

"And I," said Ernest, sotto voce to Algitha, "shall always remember the calm and thoroughness of English cheek!"

"Why, we had almost forgotten that the New Year is just upon us," exclaimed Mr. Fullerton. The first stroke of twelve began to sound almost as he spoke. He threw up the window and disclosed a night brilliant with stars. ("And under us graves," said Hadria to herself.)

They all crowded up, keeping silence as the slow strokes of the clock told the hour.

"A Happy New Year to all!" cried Mr. Fullerton heartily.



Part II.



CHAPTER XVI.

"... when the steam Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Of happy men that have the power to die." Tithonius, TENNYSON.

A countryman with stooping gait touched his cap and bid good-day to a young woman who walked rapidly along the crisp high road, smiling a response as she passed.

The road led gradually upward through a country blazing with red and orange for rolling miles, till the horizon closed in with the far-off blue of English hills.

The old man slowly turned to watch the wayfarer, whose quick step and the look in her eyes of being fixed on objects beyond their owner's immediate ken, might have suggested to the observant, inward perturbation. The lissom, swiftly moving figure was almost out of sight before the old man slowly wheeled round and continued on his way towards the hamlet of Craddock Dene, that lay in the valley about a mile further on. Meanwhile the young woman was speeding towards the village of Craddock on the summit of the gentle slope before her. A row of broad-tiled cottages came in sight, and on the hill-side the Vicarage among trees, and a grey stone church which had seen many changes since its tower first looked out from the hill-top over the southern counties.

The little village seemed as if it had forgotten to change with the rest of the country, for at least a hundred years. The spirit of the last century lingered in its quiet cottages, in the little ale-house with half-obliterated sign, in its air of absolute repose and leisure. There was no evidence of contest anywhere—except perhaps in a few mouldy advertisements of a circus and of a remarkable kind of soap, that were half peeling off a moss-covered wall. There were not even many indications of life in the place. The sunshine seemed to have the village street to itself. A couple of women stood gossiping over the gate of one of the cottages. They paused in their talk as a quick step sounded on the road.

"There be Mrs. Temperley again!" one matron exclaimed. "Why this is the second time this week, as she's come and sat in the churchyard along o' the dead. Don't seem nat'ral to my thinking."

Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Gullick continued to discuss this gloomy habit with exhaustive minuteness, involving themselves in side issues regarding the general conduct of life on the part of Mrs. Temperley, that promised solid material for conversation for the next week. It appeared from the observations of Mrs. Gullick, whose husband worked on Lord Engleton's model farm, that about five years ago Mr. Temperley had rented the Red House at Craddock Dene, and had brought his new wife to live there. The Red House belonged to Professor Fortescue, who also owned the Priory, which had stood empty, said Mrs. Gullick, since that poor Mrs. Fortescue killed herself in the old drawing-room. Mr. Temperley went every day to town to attend to his legal business, and returned by the evening train to the bosom of his family. That family now consisted in his wife and two small boys; pretty little fellows, added Mrs. Dodge, the pride of their parents' hearts; at least, so she had heard Mr. Joseph Fleming say, and he was intimate at the Red House. Mrs. Gullick did not exactly approve of Mrs. Temperley. The Red House was not, it would seem, an ever-flowing fount of sustaining port wine and spiritually nourishing literature. The moral evolution of the village had proceeded on those lines. The prevailing feeling was vaguely hostile; neither Mrs. Gullick nor Mrs. Dodge exactly knew why. Mrs. Dodge said that her husband (who was the sexton and gravedigger) had found Mrs. Temperley always ready for a chat. He spoke well of her. But Dodge was not one of many. Mrs. Temperley was perhaps too sensitively respectful of the feelings of her poorer neighbours to be very popular among them. At any rate, her habits of seclusion did not seem to village philosophy to be justifiable in the eyes of God or man. Her apparent fondness for the society of the dead also caused displeasure. Why she went to the churchyard could not be imagined: one would think she had a family buried there, she who was, "as one might say, a stranger to the place," and could not be supposed to have any interest in the graves, which held for her nor kith nor kin!

Mrs. Temperley, however, appeared to be able to dispense with this element of attraction in the "grassy barrows." She and a company of youthful Cochin-China fowls remained for hours among them, on this cheerful morning, and no observer could have determined whether it was the graves or the fowls that riveted her attention. She had perched herself on the stile that led from the churchyard to the fields: a slender figure in serviceable russet and irresponsible-looking hat, autumn-tinted too, in sympathy with the splendid season. In her ungloved left hand, which was at once sensitive and firm, she carried a book, keeping a forefinger between the pages to mark a passage.

Her face bore signs of suffering, and at this moment, a look of baffled and restless longing, as if life had been for her a festival whose sounds came from a hopeless distance. Yet there was something in the expression of the mouth, that suggested a consistent standing aloof from herself and her desires. The lines of the face could never have been drawn by mere diffusive, emotional habits. Thought had left as many traces as feeling in the firm drawing. The quality of the face was of that indefinable kind that gives to all characteristic things their peculiar power over the imagination. The more powerful the quality, the less can it be rendered into terms. It is the one marvellous, remaining, musical fact not to be defined that makes the Parthenon, or some other masterpiece of art, translate us to a new plane of existence, and inspire, for the time being, the pessimist with hope and the sceptic with religion.

The Cochin-Chinas pecked about with a contented mien among the long grass, finding odds and ends of nourishment, and here and there eking out their livelihood with a dart at a passing fly. Their long, comic, tufted legs, which seemed to form a sort of monumental pedestal whereon the bird itself was elevated, stalked and scratched about with an air of industrious serenity.

There were few mornings in the year which left unstirred the grass which grew long over the graves, but this was one of the few. Each blade stood up still and straight, bearing its string of dewdrops. There were one or two village sounds that came subdued through the sunshine. The winds that usually haunted the high spot had fallen asleep, or were lying somewhere in ambush among the woodlands beyond.

The look of strain had faded from the face of Mrs. Temperley, leaving only an expression of sadness. The removal of all necessity for concealing thought allowed her story to write itself on her face. The speculative would have felt some curiosity as to the cause of a sadness in one seemingly so well treated by destiny. Neither poverty nor the cares of great wealth could have weighed upon her spirit; she had beauty, and a quality more attractive than beauty, which must have placed many things at her command; she had evident talent—her very attitude proclaimed it—and the power over Fortune that talent ought to give. Possibly, the observer might reflect, the gift was of that kind which lays the possessor peculiarly open to her outrageous slings and arrows. Had Mrs. Temperley shown any morbid signs of self-indulgent emotionalism the problem would have been simple enough; but this was not the case.

The solitude was presently broken by the approach of an old man laden with pickaxe and shovel. He remarked upon the fineness of the day, and took up his position at a short distance from the stile, where the turf had been cleared away in a long-shaped patch. Here, with great deliberation he began his task. The sound of his steady strokes fell on the stillness. Presently, the clock from the grey tower gave forth its announcement—eleven. One by one, the slow hammer sent the waves of air rolling away, almost visibly, through the sunshine, their sound alternating with the thud of the pickaxe, so as to produce an effect of intentional rhythm. One might have fancied that clock and pickaxe iterated in turn, "Time, Death! Time, Death! Time, Death!" till the clock had come to the end of its tale, and then the pickaxe went on alone in the stillness—"Death! Death! Death! Death!"

A smile, not easy to be accounted for, flitted across the face of Mrs. Temperley.

The old gravedigger paused at last in his toil, leaning on his pickaxe, and bringing a red cotton handkerchief out of his hat to wipe his brow.

"That seems rather hard work, Dodge," remarked the onlooker, leaning her book upright on her knee and her chin on her hand.

"Ay, that it be, mum; this clay's that stiff! Lord! folks is almost as much trouble to them as buries as to them as bears 'em; it's all trouble together, to my thinkin'."

She assented with a musing nod.

"And when a man's not a troublin' o' some other body, he's a troublin' of hisself," added the philosopher.

"You are cursed with a clear-sightedness that must make life a burden to you," said Mrs. Temperley.

"Well, mum, I do sort o' see the bearin's o' things better nor most," Dodge modestly admitted. The lady knew, and liked to gratify, the gravedigger's love of long-worded discourse.

"Some people," she said, "are born contemplative, while others never reflect at all, whatever the provocation."

"Yes'm, that's just it; folks goes on as if they was to live for ever, without no thought o' dyin'. As you was a sayin' jus' now, mum, there's them as contemflecs natural like, and there's them as is born without provocation——"

"Everlastingly!" assented Mrs. Temperley with a sudden laugh. "You evidently, Dodge, are one of those who strive to read the riddle of this painful earth. Tell me what you think it is all about."

Gratified by this appeal to his judgment, Dodge scratched his head, and leant both brawny arms upon his pickaxe.

"Well, mum," he said, "I s'pose it's the will o' th' Almighty as we is brought into the world, and I don't say nothin' agin it—'tisn't my place—but it do come over me powerful at times, wen I sees all the vexin' as folks has to go through, as God A'mighty might 'a found somethin' better to do with His time; not as I wants to find no fault with His ways, which is past finding out," added the gravedigger, falling to work again.

A silence of some minutes was broken by Mrs. Temperley's enquiry as to how long Dodge had followed this profession.

"Nigh on twenty year, mum, come Michaelmas," replied Dodge. "I've lain my couple o' hundred under the sod, easy; and a fine lot o' corpses they was too, take 'em one with another." Dodge was evidently prepared to stand up for the average corpse of the Craddock district against all competitors.

"This is a very healthy neighbourhood, I suppose," observed Mrs. Temperley, seemingly by way of supplying an explanation of the proud fact.

"Lord bless you, as healthy as any place in the kingdom. There wasn't one in ten as was ill when he died, as one may say."

"But that scarcely seems an unmixed blessing," commented the lady musingly, "to go off suddenly in the full flush of health and spirits; it would be so discouraging."

"Most was chills, took sudden," Dodge explained; "chills is wot chokes up yer churchyards for yer. If we has another hard winter this year, we shall have a job to find room in here. There's one or two in the village already, as I has my eye on, wot——"

"Was this one a chill?" interrupted Mrs. Temperley, with a nod towards the new grave.

"Wot, this here? Lord bless you, no, mum. This here's our schoolmarm. Didn't you never hear tell about her?" This damning proof of his companion's aloofness from village gossip seemed to paralyse the gravedigger.

"Why everybody's been a talkin' about it. Over varty, she war, and ought to 'a knowed better."

"But, with advancing years, it is rare that people do get to know better—about dying," Mrs. Temperley suggested, in defence of the deceased schoolmistress.

"I means about her conduc'," Dodge explained; "scand'lous thing. Why, she's been in Craddock school since she war a little chit o' sixteen."

"That seems to me a trifle dull, but scarcely scandalous," Mrs. Temperley murmured.

"... And as steady and respectable a young woman as you'd wish to see ... pupil teacher she was, and she rose to be schoolmarm," Dodge went on.

"It strikes me as a most blameless career," said his companion. "Perhaps, as you say, considering her years, she ought to have known better, but——"

"She sort o' belongs to the place, as one may say," Dodge proceeded, evidently quite unaware that he had omitted to give the clue to the situation. "She's lived here all her life."

"Then much may be forgiven her," muttered Mrs. Temperley.

"And everybody respected of her, and the parson he thought a deal o' her, he did, and used to hold her up as a sample to the other young women, and nobody dreamt as she'd go and bring this here scandal on the place; nobody knows who the man was, but it is said as there's someone not twenty miles from here as knows more about it nor he didn't ought to," Dodge added with sinister meaning. This dark hint conveyed absolutely no enlightenment to the mind of Mrs. Temperley, from sheer lack of familiarity, on her part, with the rumours of the district. Dodge applied himself with a spurt to his work.

"When she had her baby, she was like one out of her mind," he continued; "she couldn't stand the disgrace and the neighbours talkin', and that. Mrs. Walker she went and saw her, and brought her nourishin' things, and kep' on a-telling her how she must try and make up for what she had done, and repent and all that; but she never got up her heart again like, and the poor soul took fever from grievin', the doctor says, and raved on dreadful, accusin' of somebody, and sayin' he'd sent her to hell; and then Wensday morning, ten o'clock, she died. Didn't you hear the passing bell a-tolling, mum?"

"Yes, the wind brought it down the valley; but I did not know whom it was tolling for."

"That's who it was," said Dodge.

"This is an awfully sad story," cried Mrs. Temperley.

Dodge ran his fingers through his hair judicially. "I don't hold with them sort o' goings on for young women," he observed.

"Do you hold with them for young men?"

Dodge puckered up his face into an odd expression of mingled reflection and worldly wisdom. "You can't prevent young fellers bein' young fellers," he at length observed.

"It seems almost a pity that being young fellows should also mean being blackguards," observed Mrs. Temperley calmly.

"Well, there's somethin' to be said for that way o' lookin' at it," Dodge was startled into agreeing.

"I suppose she gets all the blame of the thing," the lady went on, with quiet exasperation. Dodge seemed thrown off his bearings.

"Everybody in Craddock was a-talking about it, as was only to be expected," said the gravedigger. "Well, well, we're all sinners. Don't do to be too hard on folks. 'Pears sad like after keepin' 'spectable for all them years too—sort o' waste."

Mrs. Temperley gave a little laugh, which seemed to Dodge rather eccentric.

"Who is looking after the baby?" she asked.

"One of the neighbours, name o' Gullick, as her husband works for Lord Engleton, which she takes in washing," Dodge comprehensively explained.

"Had its mother no relatives?"

"Well, she had an aunt down at Southampton, I've heard tell, but she didn't take much notice of her, not she didn't. Her mother only died last year, took off sudden before her daughter could get to her."

"Your schoolmistress has known trouble," observed Mrs. Temperley. "Had she no one, no sister, no friend, during all this time that she could turn to for help or counsel?"

"Not as I knows of," Dodge replied.

There was a long pause, during which the stillness seemed to weigh upon the air, as if the pressure of Fate were hanging there with ruthless immobility.

"She ain't got no more to suffer now," Dodge remarked, nodding with an aspect of half apology towards the grave. "They sleeps soft as sleeps here."

"Good heavens, I hope so!" Mrs. Temperley exclaimed.

The grave had made considerable progress before she descended from the stile and prepared to take her homeward way. On leaving, she made Dodge come with her to the gate, and point out the red-roofed cottage covered with monthly roses and flaming creeper, where the schoolmistress had passed so many years, and where she now lay with her work and her days all over, in the tiny upper room, at whose latticed window the sun used to wake her on summer mornings, or the winter rain pattered dreary prophecies of the tears that she would one day shed.



CHAPTER XVII.

"If you please, ma'am, the cook says as the meat hasn't come for lunch, and what is she to do?"

"Without," replied Mrs. Temperley automatically.

The maid waited for more discreet directions. She had given a month's notice that very morning, because she found Craddock Dene too dull.

"Thank goodness, that barbarian is going!" Hubert had exclaimed.

"We shall but exchange a Goth for a Vandal," his wife replied.

Mrs. Temperley gazed intently at her maid, the light of intelligence gradually dawning in her countenance. "Is there anything else in the house, Sapph—Sophia?"

"No, ma'am," replied Sophia.

"Oh, tell the cook to make it into a fricassee, and be sure it is well flavoured." The maid hesitated, but seeing from the wandering expression of her employer's eye that her intellect was again clouded over, she retired to give the message to the cook—with comments.