While the momentous interview was going on, Hadria walked restlessly up and down the garden, feverishly waiting. The borders were brilliant with vast sunflowers, white lilies, and blazing "red-hot pokers" tangled together in splendid profusion, a very type of richness and glory of life. Such was the sort of existence that Hadria claimed from Fate. Her eyes turned to the bare, forlorn hills that even the August sunshine could not conjure into sumptuousness, and there she saw the threatened reality. When at last Algitha's fine figure appeared at the further end of the path, Hadria hastened forward and took her sister's arm. "It was worse than I had feared," Algitha said, with a quiver in her voice. "I _know_ I am right, and yet it seems almost more than I am equal for. When I told mother, she turned deadly white, and I thought, for a moment, that she was going to faint. Let's sit down on this seat." "Oh, it was horrible, Hadria! Mother must have been cherishing hopes about us, in a way that I don't think she quite knew herself. After that first moment of wretchedness, she flew into a passion of rage--that dreadful, tearing anger that people only feel when something of themselves is being wrenched away from them. She said that her children were all bad and unnatural; that she had spent her whole life in their interests; that if it had not been for her, we should all of us have grown up without education or accomplishments, or looks, or anything else; that she watched over us incessantly when we were little children, denying herself, spending her youth in devotion to us, when she might have gone into the world, and had some brightness and pleasure. If we imagined that she had never felt the dulness of her life, and never longed to go about and see people and things, we were much mistaken. But she had renounced everything she cared for, from her girlhood--she was scarcely older than I when her sacrifices began--and now her children gave no consideration to her; they were ready to scatter themselves hither and thither without a thought of her, or her wishes. They even talked scoffingly of the kind of life that she had led for _them_--for _them_, she repeated bitterly." Hadria's face had clouded. "Truly parents must have a bad time of it!" she exclaimed, "but does it really console them that their children should have a bad time of it too?" Algitha was trembling and very pale. "Mother says I shall ruin my life by this fad. What real good am I going to do? She says it is absurd the way we talk of things we know nothing about." "But she won't let us know about things; one must talk about _some_thing!" cried Hadria with a dispirited laugh. "She says she has experience of life, and we are ignorant of it. I reminded her that our ignorance was not exactly our fault."