e a rest under these trees?"

But Hadria preferred to go on and rest at home. She asked when Professor
Fortescue was coming to see them at the Red House, but her tone was less
open and warm than usual, in addressing him. He said that to-morrow he
would walk over in the afternoon, if he might. Hadria would not allow
her companions to come out of their way to accompany her home. At the
Priory gate--where the griffins were grinning as derisively as ever at
the ridiculous ways of men--they took their respective roads.

Some domestic catastrophe had happened at the Red House. The cook had
called Mary "names," and Mary declared she must leave. Hadria shrugged
her shoulders.

"Oh, well then, I suppose you must," she said wearily, and retired to
her room, in a mood to be cynically amused at the tragedies that the
human being manufactures for himself, lest he should not find the
tragedies of birth and death and parting, and the solitude of the
spirit, sufficient to occupy him during his little pilgrimage. She sat
by the open window that looked out over the familiar fields, and the
garden that was gay with summer flowers. The red roof of the Priory
could just be caught through the trees of the park. She wished the
little pilgrimage were over. A common enough wish, she commented, but
surely not unreasonable.

The picture of those two men came back to her, in spite of every effort
to banish it. Professor Fortescue had affected her as if he had brought
with him a new atmosphere, and disastrous was the result. It seemed as
if Professor Theobald had suddenly become a stranger to her, whom she
criticised, whose commonness of fibre, ah me! whose coarseness, she saw
as she might have seen it in some casual acquaintance. And yet she had
loved this man, she had allowed him to passionately profess love for
her. His companionship, in the deepest sense, had been chosen by her for
life. To sit by and listen to that conversation, feeling every moment
how utterly he and she were, after all, strangers to one another, how
completely unbroken was the solitude that she had craved to dispel--that
had been horrible. What had lain at the root of her conduct? How had she
deceived herself? Was it not for the sake of mere excitement,
distraction? Was it not the sensuous side of her nature that had been
touched, while the rest had been posing in the foreground? But no, that
was only partly true. There had been more in it than that; very much
more, or s