. . .' I will keep what is mine. I will
keep it!"
CHAPTER XXVII
THE AWAKENING
In her heart of hearts Hylda had not greatly welcomed the Duchess of
Snowdon to Hamley. There was no one whose friendship she prized more; but
she was passing through a phase of her life when she felt that she was
better apart, finding her own path by those intuitions and perceptions
which belonged to her own personal experience. She vaguely felt, what all
realise sooner or later, that we must live our dark hours alone.
Yet the frank downright nature of the once beautiful, now faded, Duchess,
the humorous glimmer in the pale-blue eyes, the droll irony and dry truth
of her speech, appealed to Hylda, made her smile a warm greeting when she
would rather have been alone. For, a few days before, she had begun a
quest which had absorbed her, fascinated her. The miner, finding his way
across the gap of a reef to pick up the vein of quartz at some distant
and uncertain point, could not have been more lost to the world than was
the young wife searching for a family skeleton, indefinitely embodied in
her imagination by the name, James Fetherdon.
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