When luncheon was over, Mr. Fullerton went to the garden with his family, according to a time-honoured custom. His love of flowers sometimes made Hadria wonder whether her father also had been born with certain instincts, which the accidents of life had stifled or failed to develop. Terrible was the tyranny of circumstance! What had Emerson been dreaming of? Mr. Fullerton, with a rose-bud in his button-hole, went off with the boys for a farming walk. Mrs. Fullerton returned to the house, and the sisters were left pacing together in the sheltered old garden, between two rows of gorgeous autumn flowers. Hadria felt sick with dread of the coming interview. Algitha was buoyed up, for the moment, by a strong conviction that she was in the right. "It can't be fair even for parents to order one's whole life according to their pleasure," she said. "Other girls submit, I know----" "And so the world is full of abortive, ambiguous beings, fit for nothing. The average woman always seem to me to be _muffled_----or morbid." "That's what _I_ should become if I pottered about here much longer," said Algitha--"morbid; and if there is one thing on the face of the earth that I loathe, it is morbidness." Both sisters were instinctively trying to buttress up Algitha's courage, by strengthening her position with additional arguments. "Is it fair," Hadria asked, "to summon children into the world, and then run up bills against them for future payment? Why should one not see the bearings of the matter?" "In theory one can see them clearly enough; but it is poor comfort when it comes to practice." "Oh, seeing the bearings of things is _always_ poor comfort!" exclaimed the younger sister, with sudden vehemence. "Upon my word, I think it is better, after all, to absorb indiscriminately whatever idiotcy may happen to be around one, and go with the crowd." "Nonsense!" cried Algitha, who had no sympathy with these passionate discouragements that alternated, in Hadria, with equally passionate exaltations. "When you have gone, I will ask Mrs. Gordon to teach me the spirit of acquiescence, and one of those distracting games--besique or halma, or some of the other infernal pastimes that heaven decrees for recalcitrant spirits in need of crushing discipline." "I think I see you!" Algitha exclaimed with a dispirited laugh. "It will be a trial," Hadria admitted; "but it is said that suffering strengthens the character. You may look forward before long, to claiming as sister a creature of iron purpose." "I wonder, I wonder," cried Algitha, bending her fine head; "we owe everything to her."