f course----."

"You are quite right!" cried Valeria. "I have often noticed a sort of
wildness that crops up now and then through a very smooth surface.
Hadria may sigh for the woodlands, yet----!"

CHAPTER XVIII.

The first break in the unity of the Fullerton family had occurred on the
occasion of Hadria's marriage. The short period that elapsed between
that memorable New-Year's-Eve and the wedding had been a painful
experience for Dunaghee. Hadria's conduct had shaken her brothers' faith
in her and in all womankind. Ernest especially had suffered disillusion.
He had supposed her above the ordinary, pettier weaknesses of humanity.
Other fellows' sisters had seemed to him miserable travesties of their
sex compared with her. (There was one exception only, to this rule.) But
now, what was he to think? She had shattered his faith. If she hadn't
been "so cocksure of herself," he wouldn't have minded so much; but
after all she had professed, to go and marry, and marry a starched
specimen like that!

Fred was equally emphatic. For a long time he had regarded it all as a
joke. He shook his head knowingly, and said that sort of thing wouldn't
go down. When he was at length convinced, he danced with rage. He became
cynical. He had no patience with girls. They talked for talking's sake.
It meant nothing.

Algitha understood, better than her brothers could understand, how
Hadria's emotional nature had been caught in some strange mood, how the
eloquent assurances of her lover might have half convinced her.
Algitha's own experience of proposals set her on the track of the
mystery.

"It is most misleading," she pointed out, to her scoffing brothers. "One
would suppose that marrying was the simplest thing in the world--nothing
perilous, nothing to object to about it. A man proposes to you as if he
were asking you for the sixth waltz, only his manner is perfervid. And
my belief is that half the girls who accept don't realize that they are
agreeing to anything much more serious."

"The more fools they!"

"True; but it really is most bewildering. Claims, obligations, all the
ugly sides of the affair are hidden away; the man is at his best, full
of refinement and courtesy and unselfishness. And if he persuades the
girl that he really does care for her, how can she suppose that she
cannot trust her future to him--if he loves her? And yet she can't!"

"How can a man suppose that one girl is going to be different from ever