oclasm. Having
satisfied herself that her strength would not be wasted on an incomplete
object, she made a second attempt to lay the palace low. Again she was
frustrated. The building had soared, by this time, to an ambitious
height, and its splendour had reached the limits of the materials at
command. The final pinnacle which was required to cope the structure had
been mislaid. Hadria was searching for it, when Martha, seizing her
chance, struck the palace a blow in its very heart, and in an instant,
the whole was a wreck.

"Oh, if that is to be the way of it, why should I build?" asked Hadria.

Martha gave the command for another ornamental object which she might
destroy.

"One would suppose you were a County-Council," Hadria exclaimed, "or the
practical man. No, you shall have no more beauty to annihilate, little
Vandal."

Martha, however, was now engaged in dissecting a doll, and presently a
stream of sawdust from its chest announced that she had accomplished her
dearest desire. She had found out what was inside that human effigy.

"I wish I could get at the sawdust that _I_ am stuffed with," Hadria
thought dreamily, as she watched the doll grow flabbier. "It is
wonderful how little one does know one's own sawdust. It would be
convenient to feel a little surer just now, for evidently I shall need
it all very soon. And I feel somewhat like that doll, with the stream
pouring out and the body getting limp."

She rose at last, and went to the window. The radiance of sun and green
trees and the stir of human life; the rumble of omnibuses and the sound
of wheels; the suggestion to the imagination of the river just a little
way off, and the merry little _bateaux-mouches_--it was too much. Hadria
rang for Hannah; asked her to take the child for a walk in the Bois,
stooped down to kiss the little upturned face, and went off.

In another ten minutes she was on board one of the steamboats, on her
way up the river.

She had no idea whither she was going; she would leave that to chance.
She only desired to feel the air and the sun and have an opportunity to
think. She soothed her uneasiness at the thought of Madame Vauchelet's
disappointment by promising herself to call to-morrow. She sat watching
the boats and the water and the gay banks of the river with a sense of
relief, and a curious sort of fatalism, partly suggested perhaps, by the
persistent movement of the boat, and the interminable succession of new
scenes, a