Thus, when she arose next morning and commenced to busy herself about the indispensable duties of the household, she experienced a feeling of relief to which she had been long a stranger. The day was fine, the clouds of heaven had disappeared, it would seem, simultaneously with those of her spirit. As in the Northern Britain, with its frequent rain and hail, mist and snow, this rare day, on which the disturbing forces of the elements held truce, was inexpressibly lovely. The mountain snow-crown was revealed in all its purity and austere majesty, a silver diadem against the blue and lustrous heavens. The fruit trees in the garden, the oaks and elms, poplars and walnuts, planted in fond remembrance of the dear old home-land, seemed bursting into redundant greenery. The river rippled and murmured under its o'er-arching ferns, and as the little band of dark-skinned children, with their glancing eyes and smiling faces, all obedient and cheerful, passed on to the modest building, wherein they were daily so patiently taught by their pastor and his wife, she could hardly refrain from expressing her thankfulness for the success of this single-hearted enterprise, in which she had been deemed worthy to share. That the wave of barbaric warfare might at any moment sweep over the peaceful scene, leaving ruin and desolation in its track, seemed, in the glory of that beauteous morn, incredible and preposterous. During later musings, however, when the routine business of the little school failed to absorb her attention, the thought would obtrude itself of the strange complication of affairs which would arise if, as was rumoured, Roland was about to marry this half-savage girl, as she could not but consider her. Beautiful she was by all report, devoted she must have been to her white lover, educated to a certain extent, and, in virtue of her father's lands granted in earlier times, an heiress of considerable pretensions. But----! She well knew what a death-in-life it would be considered by his English friends. Of course, it was far from improbable. Younger sons and others of aristocratic British families had married these fascinating half-caste girls, even those of pure Maori blood. This she knew from authentic sources. In this distant land, so far from British social edicts, such a marriage was not looked upon as a _mésalliance_. And if such should be his lot, who would have been the dominant factor in thus shaping his destiny? Who but herself, unwilling, doubtless, but none the less the primary agent in his deportation, his colonial career, with its risks, dangers, and this irrevocable lapse--finally, his absorption in a different class and an alien race? She felt minded to groan aloud. Why should she have been selected to work all this misery and ruin, ending, perhaps, in death? Why could she not foresee the direful consequences flowing from his fatal _entrainement_?