CHAPTER 5.
_"He stands a-sudden at the door, And no one hears his soundless tread, And no one sees his veiled head, Or silent hand, put forth so sure,_ _"To grasp and snatch from mortal sight; Or else benignly turn away, And let us live our little day, And tremble back into the light:_ _"But though thus awful to our eyes, He is an angel in disguise."_ Every human being, and certainly every woman, has, among the various ideals of happiness, good to make, if never to enjoy, one special ideal---that great necessity of every tender heart---Home.
Christian had made hers, built her castle in Spain, and furnished and adorned it from basement to battlement, even when she was a girl of fourteen.

Sitting night after night alone, listening for the father's footstep, and then trembling when she heard it, or hidden away up in her own bedroom, her sole refuge from the orgies that took place below, where the sound of music, exquisite music, went up like the cry of an angel imprisoned in a den of brutes, the girl had imagined it all.
And through every vicissitude, hidden closer for its utter contrast to all the associations and experience of her daily life, Christian Oakley had kept in her heart its innocent, womanly ideal of home.
Now, she had the reality.

And what was it?
Externally it looked _very_ bright.

Peeping into that warm, crimson- tinted dining-room at the hour between dinner and tea, when the whole family at the lodge were sure to be assembled there, any body would say what a happy family it was, and what a pleasant picture it made.
Father and mother at either end of the table; children on both sides of it; and the two elderly aunts seated comfortably in their two arm-chairs at the fireside, one knitting--_q.

e.