CHAPTER IX.


This was the period when Evadne looked out of narrow eyes at an untried
world inquiringly, and was warmed to the heart by what she saw of it.
Theoretically, people are cruel and unjust, but practically, to an
attractive young lady of good social position and just out, their manners
are most agreeable; and when Evadne returned to Fraylingay after her first
season in town, she thought less and sang more.

"A little bird in the air,
Is singing of Thyri the fair,
The sister of Svend the Dane;
And the song of the garrulous bird
In the streets of the town is heard,
And repeated again and again."

she carolled about the house, while the dust collected upon her books. She
took up one old favourite after another when she first returned, but her
attention wandered from her best beloved, and all that were solid came
somehow to be set aside and replaced, the nourishing fact by inflated
fiction, reason and logic by rhyme and rhythm, and sense by
sentimentality, so far had her strong, simple, earnest mind deteriorated
in the unwholesome atmosphere of London drawing rooms. It was only a
phase, of course, and she could have been set right at once had there been
anybody there to prescribe a strengthening tonic; but failing that, she
tried sweet stimulants that soothed and excited, but did not nourish:
tales that caused chords of pleasurable emotion to vibrate while they
fanned the higher faculties into inaction--vampire things inducing that