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.