CHAPTER IX.
FELICIA FINDS HAPPINESS Give me that peak of cloud which fills The sunset with its gorgeous form, Instead of these familiar hills That shield me from the storm.
After having been weighed in Elisabeth's balance and found wanting, Alan Tremaine went abroad for a season, and Sedgehill knew him no more until the following spring.

During that time Elisabeth possessed her soul and grew into a true woman--a woman with no smallness or meanness in her nature, but with certain feminine weaknesses which made her all the more lovable to those people who understood her, and all the more incongruous and irritating to those who did not.

Christopher, too, rested in an oasis of happiness just then.

He was an adept in the study of Elisabeth, and he knew perfectly well what had passed between her and Alan, although she flattered herself that she had kept him completely in the dark on the subject.

But Christopher was always ready to dance to Elisabeth's piping, except when it happened to be on red-hot iron; even then he tried to obey her bidding, and it was hardly his fault if he failed.
Christopher Thornley was one of those people whose temperament and surroundings are at war with each other.