Under all her severity, however, Miss Semaphore was by no means as rigid as she looked. Since coming to London, she had begun half-unconsciously to contrast the life she had led with the lives that young women about her led. Something stirred vaguely in her. She felt she had been defrauded of many things that were bright and pleasant and harmless in themselves. How matters in the past could 44have been different she did not quite know, but she wished they had been different. All this was food to her desire to be young, to have her time over again, to enjoy herself just a little; and many of her disagreeable speeches might have been traced, by a student of human nature, to the bitterness towards others that sometimes wells in the heart of a lonely woman, making her feel, “I have had a bad time, why should not they?”

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CHAPTER IV. CASTLES IN THE AIR.

CASTLES IN THE AIR.

That evening, a little shamefacedly, Miss Semaphore told Prudence how she had answered the advertisement in The Pictorial, and received a reply from Mrs. Geldheraus.

Prudence was very much surprised and delighted, being in one of her rare spasms of remembrance that she no longer was a girl. She expressed herself as not only willing but ready and anxious to help in raising half of the money required, if the explorer’s widow persisted in demanding a thousand pounds.

The sisters resolved, however, that Miss Augusta should endeavour to persuade her to accept £600, advancing to £800, and only paying the full sum if she remained obdurate. They decided, too, that despite her excellent references, it would be only judicious to postdate the cheque offered her, that they might have an opportunity of personally testing the 46efficacy of the water before the draft was presented.

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“She is very emphatic as to its genuineness,” said Miss Semaphore; “but of course we do not know her, and she may not speak the truth. If she is an honest person—and certainly her references are all that can be desired—she will be quite willing to give us a chance of first finding out whether the water is really any good. 

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