ia, 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 merr