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In recording it for Algitha's benefit that evening, Hadria found that she could not reproduce the exhilarating quality, or describe the influence of Miss Du Prel's personality. It was as if, literally, a private and particular atmosphere had encompassed her. She was "alive all round," as her disciple asserted. Her love of Nature was intense.
You are all that I have in life to cling to. Write to me, dearest Hadria, for I am very anxious and wretched." The affairs of life and death mix themselves incongruously enough, in this confused world. The next news that stirred the repose of Craddock Dene, was that of Algitha's engagement to Wilfrid Burton. In spite of his socialistic views, Mrs.
Fullerton was satisfied with the marriage, because Wilfrid Burton was well-connected and had good expectations. The mother had feared that Algitha would never marry at all, and she not only raised no objection, but seemed relieved. Wilfrid Burton had come down to stay at the Red House, during one of Algitha's holidays, and it was then that the betrothal had taken place.
And, alas! she had been fretting very much about Hadria. After Algitha's misdeed, this second blow struck hard. One must act on one's own convictions and not on those of somebody else, however beloved that other person might be, but truly the penalty of daring to take an independent line of action was almost unbearably severe.
You boys don't know what she went through. We all regret her marriage to Hubert Temperley though between ourselves, not more than he regrets it, if I am not much mistaken but it is very certain that she could not have gone on living at home much longer, as things were." Fred said that she ought to have broken out after Algitha's fashion, if it was so bad as all that.
The sentiment was so entirely unlike any that the ardent President of the Society had ever been known to express before, that brothers and sisters crowded up to enquire into the cause of the unusual mood. "Oh, it is only the moonlight that has got into my head," she said, flinging back the cloudy black hair from her brow. Algitha's firm, clear voice vibrated through the room.
"But what are you going to do?" asked a chorus of voices. Hadria's was not among them, for she knew what was coming. The debate of last night, and this morning's discussion, had evidently brought to a climax a project that Algitha had long had in her mind, but had hesitated to carry out, on account of the distress that it would cause to her mother. Algitha's eyes glittered, and her colour rose.
Both sisters were instinctively trying to buttress up Algitha's courage, by strengthening her position with additional arguments. "Is it fair," Hadria asked, "to summon children into the world, and then run up bills against them for future payment? Why should one not see the bearings of the matter?" "In theory one can see them clearly enough; but it is poor comfort when it comes to practice."
As Hadria drove over the winding upland road back to her home, her thoughts followed her sister into her new existence, and then turned wistfully backwards to the days that had been marked off into the past by Algitha's departure. How bright and eager and hopeful they had all been, how full of enthusiasm and generous ambitions!
Yet she too, it turned out, for all her smiles and her cheerfulness, was busy and weary with futilities. She too, like the fifty daughters of Danaus, was condemned to the idiot's labour of eternally drawing water in sieves from fathomless wells. Algitha's marriage took place almost immediately. There was no reason for delay.
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