du Prel
was to be a near neighbour? It seemed too good to be true!

When Miss Du Prel came down in her walking garments, she greeted Hadria
with a certain absence of mind, which smote chill upon the girl's
eagerness.

"I wanted to know if you were comfortable, if I could do anything for
you." Miss Du Prel woke up.

"Oh no, thank you; you are very kind. I am most comfortable--at
least--it is very strange, but I have lost my keys and my umbrella and
my handbag--I can't think what I can have done with them. Oh, and my
purse is gone too!"

Whereupon Mrs. McEwen in dismay, Mr. McEwen (who then appeared), the
maid, and Hadria, hunted high and low for the missing properties, which
were brought to light, one by one, in places where their owner had
already "thoroughly searched," and about which she had long since
abandoned hope.

She received them with mingled joy and amazement, and having responded
to Mrs. McEwen's questions as to what she would like for dinner, she
proposed to Hadria that they should take a walk together.

Hadria beamed. Miss Du Prel seemed both amused and gratified by her
companion's worship, and the talk ran on, in a light and pleasant vein,
differing from the talk of the ordinary mortal, Hadria considered, as
champagne differs from ditch-water.

In recording it for Algitha's benefit that evening, Hadria found that
she could not reproduce the exhilarating quality, or describe the
influence of Miss Du Prel's personality. It was as if, literally, a
private and particular atmosphere had encompassed her. She was "alive
all round," as her disciple asserted.

Her love of Nature was intense. Hadria had never before realized that
she had been without full sympathy in this direction. She awoke to a
strange retrospective sense of solitude, feeling a new pity for the
eager little child of years ago, who had wandered up to the garret, late
at night, to watch the moonlight spread its white shroud over the hills.

With every moment spent in the society of Valeria Du Prel, new and
clearer light seemed to Hadria, to be thrown upon all the problems of
existence; not by any means only through what Miss Du Prel directly
said, but by what she implied, by what she took for granted, by what she
omitted to say.

"It seems like a home-coming from long exile," Hadria wrote to her
sister. "I have been looking through a sort of mist, or as one looks at
one's surroundings before quite waking. Now everything stands out sha