“To me it matters very much indeed. I don’t consider it a trifle,” said Temperley, in some bewilderment.
“Oh, not to ourselves. But of what importance are we?”
“None at all, in a certain sense,” Temperley admitted; “but in another sense we are all important. I cannot help being intensely personal at this moment. I can’t help grasping at the hope of happiness. Hadria, it lies in your hand. Won’t you be generous?”
She gave a distressed gesture, and seemed to make some vain effort, as when the victim of a nightmare struggles to overcome the paralysis that holds him.
“Then I may hope a little, Hadria—I must hope.”
Still the trance seemed to hold her enthralled. The music was diabolically merry. She could fancy evil spirits tripping to it in swarms around her. They seemed to point at her, and wave their arms around her, and from them came an influence, magnetic in its quality, that forbade her to resist. All had been pre-arranged. Nothing could avert it. She seemed to be waiting rather than acting. Against her inner judgment, she had allowed those accursed practices to go on. Against her instinct, she had permitted Henriette to become intimate at Dunaghee; indeed it would have been hard to avoid it, for Miss Temperley was not easy to discourage. Why had she assured Hadria so pointedly that Hubert would not misinterpret her consent to renew the practices? Was it not a sort of treachery? Had not Henriette, with her larger knowledge of the world, been perfectly well aware that whatever might be said, the renewal of the meetings would be regarded as encouragement? Did she not know that Hadria herself would feel implicated by the concession?
Temperley’s long silence had been misleading. The danger had crept up insidiously. And had she not been treacherous to herself? She had longed for companionship, for music, for something to break the strain of her wild, lonely life. Knowing, or rather half-divining the risk, she had allowed herself to accept the chance of relief when it came. Lack of experience had played a large part in the making of to-night’s dilemma. Hadria’s own strange mood was another ally to her lover, and for that, old Mrs. McPherson and her reels were chiefly responsible. Of such flimsy trifles is the human fate often woven.
“Tell me, did you ask your sister to——?”
“No, no,” Hubert interposed. “My sister knows of my hopes, and is anxious that I should succeed.”
“I thought that she was helping you.”