V.

Hadria tried to avoid Professor Theobald, but he was not easily avoided.
She frequently met him in her walks. The return of spring had tempted
her to resume her old habit of rising with the sun. But she found, what
she had feared, that her strength had departed, and she was fatigued
instead of invigorated, as of yore. She did not regard this loss in a
resigned spirit. Resignation was certainly not her strong point. The
vicar's wife and the doctor's wife and the rest of the neighbours
compared their woes and weariness over five o'clock tea, and these
appeared so many and so severe that Hadria felt half ashamed to count
hers at all. Yet why lower the altars of the sane goddess because her
shrine was deserted? Health was health, though all the women of England
were confirmed invalids. And with nothing less ought reasonable
creatures to be satisfied. As for taking enfeeblement as a natural
dispensation, she would as soon regard delirium tremens in that light.

She chafed fiercely against the loss of that blessed sense of well-being
and overflowing health, that she used to have, in the old days. She
resented the nerve-weariness, the fatigue that she was now more
conscious of than ever, with the coming of the spring. The impulse of
creative energy broke forth in her. The pearly mornings and the birds'
songs stirred every instinct of expression. The outburst did not receive
its usual check. The influences of disenchantment were counteracted by
Professor Fortescue's presence. His sympathy was marvellous in its
penetration, brimming the cold hollows of her spirit, as a flooded
river fills the tiniest chinks and corners about its arid banks. He
called forth all her natural buoyancy and her exulting sense of life,
which was precisely the element which charged her sadness with such a
fierce electric quality, when she became possessed by it, as a cloud by
storm.

Valeria too was roused by the season.

"What a parable it all is, as old as the earth, and as fresh, each new
year, as if a messenger-angel had come straight from heaven, in his
home-spun of young green, to tell us that all is well."

If Hadria met Professor Theobald in her rambles, she always cut short
her intended walk. She and Valeria with Professor Fortescue wandered
together, far and wide. They watched the daily budding greenery, the
gleams of daffodils among their sword-blades of leaves, the pushing of
sheaths and heads through the teeming soil, the bursts