r blazing heart was fierce and unyielding. He watched her
go, and a pleasurable pain filled him, a sense of triumph and
easy power, followed immediately by acute pity.

"I'm sure that was unnecessary--to hit the girl across
the face," said the mother coldly.

"A flip with the duster won't hurt her," he said.

"Nor will it do her any good."

For days, for weeks, Ursula's heart burned from this rebuff.
She felt so cruelly vulnerable. Did he not know how vulnerable
she was, how exposed and wincing? He, of all people, knew. And
he wanted to do this to her. He wanted to hurt her right through
her closest sensitiveness, he wanted to treat her with shame, to
maim her with insult.

Her heart burnt in isolation, like a watchfire lighted. She
did not forget, she did not forget, she never forgot. When she
returned to her love for her father, the seed of mistrust and
defiance burned unquenched, though covered up far from sight.
She no longer belonged to him unquestioned. Slowly, slowly, the
fire of mistrust and defiance burned in her, burned away her
connection with him.

She ran a good deal alone, having a passion for all moving,
active things. She loved the little brooks. Wherever she found a
little running water, she was happy. It seemed to make her run
and sing in spirit along with it. She could sit for hours by a
brook or stream, on the roots of the alders, and watch the water
hasten dancing over the stones, or among the twigs of a fallen
branch. Sometimes, little fish vanished before they had become
real, like hallucinations, sometimes wagtails ran by the water's
brink, sometimes other little birds came to drink. She saw a
kingfisher darting blue--and then she was very happy. The
kingfisher was the key to the magic world: he was witness of the
border of enchantment.

But she must move out of the intricately woven illusion of
her life: the illusion of a father whose life was an Odyssey in
an outer world; the illusion of her grandmother, of realities so
shadowy and far-off that they became as mystic
symbols:--peasant-girls with wreaths of blue flowers in
their hair, the sledges and the depths of winter; the
dark-bearded young grandfather, marriage and war and death; then
the multitude of illusions concerning herself, how she was truly
a princess of Poland, how in England she was under a spell, she
was not really this Ursula Brangwen; then the mirage of her
reading: out of the multicoloured illusion of this her life,