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Sometimes, returning through the Craddock Woods, Hadria would pass through the churchyard on her way home, after her walk, and there she would come upon Dodge patiently at work upon some new grave, the sound of his pickaxe breaking the autumn silence, ominously. His head was more bent than of yore, and his hair was whiter.
What if one's stars and kingdoms lay on the further side of a crime or a cruelty? What then was left but to gather up one's herbs and apples, and bear, as best one might, the scorn of the unjust Days? Hadria cast about in her mind for a method of utilizing to the best advantage possible, the means at her disposal: to force circumstance to yield a harvest to her will.
"I have sometimes thought," said Hadria, "that when we seem to cling most desperately to our reason, we are really refusing to accept its guidance into unfamiliar regions. We confuse the familiar with the reasonable." "Exactly.
"I never met girls before, who wanted to come out of their cotton-wool," he observed. "I thought girls loved cotton-wool. They always seem to." "Girls seem an astonishing number of things that they are not," said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to learn the real thoughts and wishes of a girl."
She had to summon her intelligence to the rescue. The Fullerton stock had never been deficient in this particular. In difficult moments, when rule and tradition had done their utmost, Hadria had often some original device to suggest, to fit the individual case, which tided them over a crisis, or avoided some threatening predicament. "Are you sleeping?" asked Algitha, very softly.
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.
"Why ma'am, I thought you was never coming again to play on the piano; I have missed it, that I have. It makes the old place seem that cheerful I can almost fancy it's my poor young mistress come back again. She used to sit and play on that piano, by the hour together." "I am glad you have enjoyed it," said Hadria gently.
Hadria remembered him and his kindness to her and the rest of the children, in the old days; the stories he used to tell when he took them for walks, stories full of natural lore more marvellous than any fairy tale, though he could tell fairy tales too, by the dozen. He had seemed to them like some wonderful and benevolent magician, and they adored him, one and all.
Hadria admitted the danger of indiscriminate absorption, but pointed out that if caution were carried too far, one might end by finding nothing inside of one at all, which also threatened to be attended with inconvenience. Dodge seemed to feel that the désagréments in this last case were trivial as compared with those of the former. "Dodge is a born sceptic," said Lady Engleton.
His love of flowers sometimes made Hadria wonder whether her father also had been born with certain instincts, which the accidents of life had stifled or failed to develop. Terrible was the tyranny of circumstance! What had Emerson been dreaming of? Mr. Fullerton, with a rose-bud in his button-hole, went off with the boys for a farming walk. Mrs.
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