smash, the state of
affairs would be desperate. Their father, in his optimistic fashion,
still believed that the company would pull through. Of course all this
anxiety was telling seriously on their mother. And, alas! she had been
fretting very much about Hadria. After Algitha's misdeed, this second
blow struck hard.

One must act on one's own convictions and not on those of somebody else,
however beloved that other person might be, but truly the penalty of
daring to take an independent line of action was almost unbearably
severe. It really seemed, at times, as if there were nothing for it but
to fold one's hands and do exactly as one was bid. Algitha was beginning
to wonder whether her own revolt was about to be expiated by a life-long
remorse!

"Ah, if mother had only not sacrificed herself for us, how infinitely
grateful I should feel to her now! What sympathy there might have been
between us all! If she had but given herself a chance, how she might
have helped us, and what a friend she might have been to us, and we to
her! But she would not."

Algitha said that her mother evidently felt Hadria's departure as a
disgrace to the family. It was pathetic to hear her trying to answer
people's casual questions about her, so as to conceal the facts without
telling an untruth. Hadria was overwhelmed by this letter. Her first
impulse was to pack up and go straight to Dunaghee. But as Algitha was
there now, this seemed useless, at any rate for the present. And ought
she after all to abandon her project, for which so much had been risked,
so much pain inflicted? The question that she and Algitha thought they
had decided long ago, began to beat again at the door of her conscience
and her pity. Her reason still asserted that the suffering which people
entail upon themselves, through a frustrated desire to force their own
law of conduct on others, must be borne by themselves, as the penalty of
their own tyrannous instinct and of their own narrow thought. It was
utterly unfair to thrust that natural penalty of prejudice and of
self-neglect on to the shoulders of others. Why should they be protected
from the appointed punishment, by the offering of another life on the
altar of their prejudice? Why should such a sacrifice be made in order
to gratify their tyrannical desire to dictate? It was not fair, it was
not reasonable.

Yet this conclusion of the intellect did not prevent the pain of pity
and compunction, nor an inconsequen