that all is
right."

"Then I will come too," said Algitha.

They stole down stairs together, in the dim light of the oil lamps that
were kept burning all night. The clock struck the half-hour as they
passed along the landing. A strange fancy came to Hadria, that a dusky
figure drifted away before her, as she advanced. It seemed as though
death had receded at her approach. The old childish love for her mother
had revived in all its force, during this long fight with the reaper of
souls. She felt all her energies strung with the tension of battle. She
fought against a dark horror that she could not face. Knowing, and
realising vividly, that if her mother lived, her own dreams were ended
for ever, she wrestled with desperate strength for the life that was at
stake. Her father's silent wretchedness was terrible to see. He would
not hear a word of doubt as to the patient's recovery. He grew angry if
anyone hinted at danger. He insisted that his wife was better each day.
She would soon be up and well again.

"Never well again," the doctor had confided to Hubert, "though she may
possibly pull through."

Mr. Fullerton's extravagant hopefulness sent a thrill along the nerves.
It was as if he had uttered the blackest forebodings. The present crisis
had stirred a thousand feelings and associations, in Hadria, which had
long been slumbering. She seemed to be sent back again, to the days of
her childhood. The intervening years were blotted out. She realized now,
with agonising vividness, the sadness of her mother's life, the long
stagnation, the slow decay of disused faculties, and the ache that
accompanies all processes of decay, physical or moral. Not only the
strong appeal of old affection, entwined with the earliest associations,
was at work, but the appeal of womanhood itself:--the grey sad story of
a woman's life, bare and dumb and pathetic in its irony and pain: the
injury from without, and then the self-injury, its direct offspring;
unnecessary, yet inevitable; the unconscious thirst for the sacrifice of
others, the hungry claims of a nature unfulfilled, the groping instinct
to bring the balance of renunciation to the level, and indemnify oneself
for the loss suffered and the spirit offered up. And that propitiation
had to be made. It was as inevitable as that the doom of Orestes should
follow the original crime of the house of Atreus. Hadria's whole thought
and strength were now centred on the effort to bring about tha