as no distraction of the
attention by outside objects. Nothing offered itself to the sight except
the strange lights and shadows of the lamp thrown on the cushions of the
carriage; Henriette's figure in one corner, Hannah, with the child, in
another, and the various rugs and trappings of wandering Britons.
Everything was contracted, narrow. The sea-passage had the same sinister
character. Hadria compared it to the crossing of the Styx in Charon's
gloomy ferry-boat.

She felt a patriotic thrill on hearing the first mellow English voice
pronouncing the first kindly English sentence. The simple, slow, honest
quality of the English nature gave one a sense of safety. What splendid
raw material to make a nation out of! But, ah, it was sometimes dull to
live with! These impressions, floating vaguely in the upper currents of
the mind, were simultaneous with a thousand thoughts and anxieties, and
gusts of bitter fear and grief.

What would be the end of it all? This uprooting from the old home--it
wrung one's heart to think of it. Scarcely could the thought be faced.
Her father, an exile from his beloved fields and hills; her mother
banished from her domain of so many years, and after all these
disappointments and mortifications and sorrows! It was piteous. Where
would they live? What would they do?

Hadria fought with her tears. Ah! it was hard for old people to have to
start life anew, bitterly hard. This was the moment for their children
to flock to their rescue, to surround them with care, with affection,
with devotion; to make them feel that at least _some_thing that could be
trusted, was left to them from the wreck.

"Ah! poor mother, poor kind father, you were very good to us all, very,
very good!"

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Mrs. Fullerton's illness proved even more serious than the doctor had
expected. She asked so incessantly for her daughters, especially Hadria,
that all question of difference between her and Hubert was laid aside,
by tacit consent, and the sisters took their place at their mother's
bedside. The doctor said that the patient must have been suffering, for
many years, from an exhausted state of the nerves and from some kind of
trouble. Had she had any great disappointment or anxiety?

Hadria and Algitha glanced at one another. "Yes," said Algitha, "my
mother has had a lot of troublesome children to worry and disappoint
her."

"Ah!" exclaimed the doctor, nodding his head. "Well, now has come a
c