For a few days her mind, in its grateful repose, hesitated to grapple with the question which had sent her to the mountains; and on one of them, while thinking idly on the great political questions which had magnetized so much of her thought during the past year, the inspiration for which she had so often longed shot up from the concentrated results of thinking and experience, and revealed in what manner she could be of service to her country. This was, whatever her personal life, to gather about her, once a week, as many bright boys of her own condition as she could find, and interest and educate them in the principles of patriotic statesmanship. With her own burning interest in the subject and her personal fascination, she could accomplish far more than any weary professor could do. She had come up to these fastnesses to decide the future happiness of one or two of three people, and she felt sober enough; but for almost a week she wished that she could live here alone for the rest of her life: she believed that in time she would be serenely content. She had the largest capacity for human happiness, but she guessed that the imagination could be so trained that when far from worldly conditions it could create a world of its own, and would shrink more and more from the practical realities. For Imagination has the instinct of a nun in its depths and loves the cloister of a picturesque solitude. It is a Fool's Paradise, but not inferior to the one which mortals are at liberty to enter and ruin. But Betty could not live here alone, she could not ignore her responsibilities in any such primitive fashion; and so long as her heart was alive it would make battle for real and tangible happiness. She had a question to decide which involved not only the heart but the mind: if she made a mistake now, she would be at odds with her higher faculties for the rest of her life. She dreaded the sophistry which sat on either side of the subject; and it was a question whether the very strength of her impulse toward the man she had loved for a year was not the strongest argument in its favour. But she had given her word to another man, and she had the high and almost fanatical sense of honour of the Southern race. On the other hand, she had a practical modern brain, and during the last year she had been living in close contact with much hard common-sense. She had imagination, and she knew that she already had made Burleigh suffer deeply, and had it in her power to raise that suffering to acuteness; and if that buoyant nature were soured, a useful career might be seriously impaired. On the other hand, she had made a greater man more miserable still, and while he was finding life black enough she had rushed into the camp of the enemy; and his capacity for suffering was far deeper and more enduring than that of the younger man.