hat they dedicated to the mimic battle. Hours and hours were spent in
this way. But Hadria found that she could not endure it every night,
much to the surprise of her parents. The monotony, the incessant
recurrence, had a disastrous effect on her nerves, suggesting wild and
desperate impulses.

"I should go out of my mind, if I had no breaks," she said at last,
after trying it for some months. "In the interests of future rubbers, I
_must_ leave off, now and then. He that plays and runs away, will live
to play another day."

Mrs. Fullerton thought it strange that Hadria could not do even this
little thing for her parents, without grumbling, but she did not wish to
make a martyr of her. They must try and find some one else to take her
place occasionally.

Sometimes Joseph Fleming would accept the post, sometimes Lord Engleton,
and often Ernest or Fred, whose comparatively well-ordered minds were
not sent off their balance so easily as Hadria's. In this fashion, the
time went by, and the new state of affairs already seemed a hundred
years old. Paris was a clear, but far-off dream. An occasional letter
from Madame Vauchelet or Jouffroy, who mourned and wailed over Hadria's
surrender of her work, served to remind her that it had once been actual
and living. There still existed a Paris far away beyond the hills,
brilliant, vivid, exquisite, inspiring, and at this very moment the
people were coming and going, the river was flowing, the little steamers
plying,--but how hard it was to realise!

The family was charmed with the position of affairs.

"It is such a mercy things have happened as they have!" was the verdict,
delivered with much wise shaking of heads. "There can be no more mad or
disgraceful behaviour on the part of Hubert's wife, that is one comfort.
She can't murder her mother outright, though she has not been far off
it!"

From the first, Hadria had understood what the future must be. These
circumstances could not be overcome by any deed that she could bring
herself to do. Even Valeria was baffled. Her theories would not quite
work. Hadria looked things straight in the face. That which was
strongest and most essential in her must starve; there was no help for
it, and no one was directly to blame, not even herself. Fate, chance,
Providence, the devil, or whatever it was, had determined against her
particular impulses and her particular view of things. After all, it
would have been rather strange if these power