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Gordon to teach me the spirit of acquiescence, and one of those distracting games bésique or halma, or some of the other infernal pastimes that heaven decrees for recalcitrant spirits in need of crushing discipline." "I think I see you!" Algitha exclaimed with a dispirited laugh. "It will be a trial," Hadria admitted; "but it is said that suffering strengthens the character.
Algitha, in a large black cloak, stood over it with a hazel stick like a wand stirring and heaping on the fuel, as the mass began to smoulder and to send forth a thick white smoke that gradually filled the cavern, curling up into the rocky roof and swirling round and out by the square-cut mouth, to be caught there by the slight wind and illumined by the sun, which poured down upon the soft coils of the smoke, in so strange a fashion, as to call forth a cry of wonder from the onlookers.
"It is no use trying to dance a reel without Hadria," said a tall youth, evidently her brother, if one might judge from his almost southern colouring and melancholy eyes. In build and feature he resembled the elder sister, Algitha, who had all the characteristics of a fine northern race.
"My dear Algitha, there are a dozen empty rooms between us and the inhabited part of the house, not to mention the fact that we are a storey above everyone except the ghosts, so I think you may compose yourself." However, the excited voices were hushed a little as the discussion continued. One of the chief charms of the institution, in the eyes of the members of the Society, was its secrecy.
"I begin to understand how it is that people take to drinking," she said to Algitha, who used to bemoan this vice, with its terrible results, of which she had seen so much. "Ah! don't talk of it in that light way!" cried Algitha. "It is the fashion to treat it airily, but if people only knew what an awful curse it is, I think they would feel ashamed to be 'moderate' and indifferent about it."
"Wise and learned youth!" cried Hadria, resting her chin on her hand, and peering up into the blue sky, above the temple. "Fool!" exclaimed Algitha. "He says," continued Fred, determined not to spare those who were so overbearing in their scorn, "he says that girls who have ideas like yours will never get any fellow to marry them." Laughter loud and long greeted this announcement.
"One begins to learn everything too late," she wrote to Algitha. "This ought all to have been familiar long ago. I don't know anything about the world in which I live. I have never before caught so much as a distant glimpse of it.
"Then for heaven's sake, let us purchase with them something worth having!" Hadria cried. "Hear, hear!" assented Algitha. "Unpleasant facts being a foregone conclusion," Hadria added, "the point to aim at obviously is interesting facts and plenty of them." Ernest flicked a pebble off the parapet of the balustrade of the little temple, and watched it fall, with a silent splash, into the river.
"I am quite ready to give gratitude and sacrifice too," said Algitha, "but I don't feel that I ought to sacrifice everything to an idea that seems to me wrong. Surely a human being has a right to his own life. If he has not that, what, in heaven's name, has he?" "Anything but that!" cried Hadria.
It was while the brothers Espec were studying under this master of grammar, and indulging with spirit and energy in the sports and recreations fashionable among the boys of the thirteenth century such as playing with whirligigs and paper windmills, and mimic engines of war, and trundling hoops, and shooting with bows and arrows, and learning to swim on bladders, that Dame Algitha followed her husband to a better world, and they found themselves orphans and unprotected.
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