anding her, Joseph Fleming had grown to feel
towards Mrs. Temperley a genuine liking, conscious, in his vague way,
that she was kind at heart, however bitter or strange she might
sometimes be in her speech. Moreover, she was not always eccentric or
unexpected. There would come periods when she would say and do very much
as her neighbours said and did; looking then pale and lifeless, but
absolutely beyond the reach of hostile criticism, as her champion would
suggest to carping neighbours.

Not the most respected of the ladies who turned up their disapproving
noses, was more dull or more depressing than Hadria could be, on
occasion, as she had herself pointed out; and would not _this_ soften
stony hearts?

When she discovered that her kindly neighbour had been fighting her
battles for her, she was touched; but she asked him not to expend his
strength on her behalf. She tried in vain to convince him that she did
not care to be invited too often to submit to the devitalizing processes
of social intercourse, to which the families of the district shrank not
from subjecting themselves. If Joseph Fleming chanced to call at the Red
House after her return from one of these entertainments, he was sure to
find Mrs. Temperley in one of her least comprehensible moods. But
whatever she might say, he stood up for her among the neighbours with
persistent loyalty. He decked her with virtues that she did not possess,
and represented her to the sceptical district, radiant in domestic
glory. Hadria thus found herself in an awkwardly uncertain position;
either she was looked at askance, as eccentric, or she found herself
called upon to make good expectations of saintliness, such as never were
on land or sea.

Saintly? Hadria shook her head. She could imagine no one further from
such a condition than she was at present, and she felt it in her, to
swing down and down to the very opposite pole from that serene altitude.
She admitted that, from a utilitarian point of view, she was making a
vast mistake. As things were, Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Allan, laboriously
spinning their ponderous families on their own axes, in a reverent
spirit, had chosen the better part. But Hadria did not care. She would
_not_ settle down to make the best of things, as even Algitha now
recommended, "since there she was, and there was no helping it."

"I will _never_ make the best of things," she said. "I know nothing that
gives such opportunities to the Devil."

Hadr