the eastward rock, poured straight into the little temple. Below and
around on the cliff-sides, the rich foliage of holly and dwarf oak, ivy,
and rowan with its burning berries, was transformed into a mass of warm
colour and shining surfaces.

"What always bewilders me," Hadria said, bending over the balustrade
among the ivy, "is the enormous gulf between what _might be_ and what
_is_ in human life. Look at the world--life's most sumptuous stage--and
look at life! The one, splendid, exquisite, varied, generous, rich
beyond description; the other, poor, thin, dull, monotonous, niggard,
distressful--is that necessary?"

"But all lives are not like that," objected Fred.

"I speak only from my own narrow experience," said Hadria.

"Oh, she is thinking, as usual, of that unfortunate Mrs. Gordon!" cried
Ernest.

"Of her, and the rest of the average, typical sort of people that I
know," Hadria admitted. "I wish to heaven I had a wider knowledge to
speak from."

"If one is to believe what one hears and reads," said Algitha, "life
must be full of sorrow indeed."

"But putting aside the big sorrows," said her sister, "the ordinary
every day existence that would be called prosperous, seems to me to be
dull and stupid to a tragic extent."

"The Gordons of Drumgarran once more! I confess I can't see anything
particularly tragic there," observed Fred, whose memory recalled troops
of stalwart young persons in flannels, engaged for hours, in sending a
ball from one side of a net to the other.

"It is more than tragic; it is disgusting!" cried Hadria with a shiver.
Algitha drew herself together. She turned to her eldest brother.

"Look here, Ernest; you said just now that girls were shielded from the
realities of life. Yet Mrs. Gordon was handed over by her protectors,
when she was little more than a school-girl, without knowledge, without
any sort of resource or power of facing destiny, to--well, to the
hateful realities of the life that she has led now for over twenty
years. There is nothing to win general sympathy in this case, for Mr.
Gordon is good and kind; but oh, think of the existence that a
'protected,' carefully brought-up girl may be launched into, before she
knows what she is pledged to, or what her ideas of life may be! If
_that_ is what you call protection, for heaven's sake let us remain
defenceless."

Fred and Ernest accused their elder sister of having been converted by
Hadria. Algitha, honest and courage