do manage to ferret out the unpleasant aspects of our position!"
Miss Du Prel exclaimed. "But I want to know why you do this, Hadria. It
is good of you, but totally unlike you."

"You are very polite!" cried Hadria. "Why should I not lay up store for
myself in heaven, as well as Mrs. Walker and the rest?"

"You were not thinking of heaven when you did this deed, Hadria."

"No; I was thinking of the other place."

"And do you hope to get any satisfaction out of your _protegee_?"

Hadria shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know. The child is the result of great sorrow and suffering; it
is the price of a woman's life; a woman who offended the world, having
lived for nearly forty weary obedient years, in circumstances dreary
enough to have turned twenty saints into as many sinners. No; I am no
Lady Bountiful. I feel in defending this child--a sorry defence I
know--that I am, in so far, opposing the world and the system of things
that I hate----. Ah! _how_ I hate it!"

"Is it then hatred that prompts the deed?"

Hadria looked thoughtfully towards the church tower, in whose shadow the
mother of the babe lay sleeping.

"Can you ever quite unravel your own motives, Valeria? Hatred? Yes;
there is a large ingredient of hatred. Without it, probably this poor
infant would have been left to struggle through life alone, with a
mill-stone round its neck, and a miserable constitution into the
bargain. I hope to rescue its constitution. But that poor woman's story
touched me closely. It is so hard, so outrageous! The emptiness of her
existence; the lack of outlet for her affections; the endless monotony;
and then the sudden new interest and food for the starved emotions; the
hero-worship that is latent in us all; and then--good heavens!--for a
touch of poetry, of romance in her life, she would have been ready to
believe in the professions of the devil himself--and this man was a very
good understudy for the devil! Ah! If ever I should meet him!"

"What would you do?" Valeria asked curiously.

"Avenge her," said Hadria with set lips.

"Easier said than done, my dear!"

Gossip asserted that the father of the child was a man of some standing,
the bolder spirits even accusing Lord Engleton himself. But this was
conjecture run wild, and nobody seriously listened to it.

Mrs. Walker was particularly scandalized with Mrs. Temperley's
ill-advised charity. Hadria had the habit of regarding the clergyman's
wife as another of society