e of the spots on it as the sheep are. It seems as if,
lying there under the blue sky or the low grey clouds with all the world
held at bay by mere space and stillness, they must feel something we
know nothing of. I want to go and find out what it is."

This she had once said to Mount Dunstan.

So she had fallen into the habit of walking there with her dog at her
side as her sole companion, for having need for time and space for
thought, she had found them in the silence and aloofness.

Life had been a vivid and pleasurable thing to her, as far as she could
look back upon it. She began to realise that she must have been very
happy, because she had never found herself desiring existence other than
such as had come to her day by day. Except for her passionate childish
regret at Rosy's marriage, she had experienced no painful feeling.
In fact, she had faced no hurt in her life, and certainly had been
confronted by no limitations. Arguing that girls in their teens usually
fall in love, her father had occasionally wondered that she passed
through no little episodes of sentiment, but the fact was that her
interests had been larger and more numerous than the interests of girls
generally are, and her affectionate intimacy with himself had left no
such small vacant spaces as are frequently filled by unimportant young
emotions. Because she was a logical creature, and had watched life and
those living it with clear and interested eyes, she had not been blind
to the path which had marked itself before her during the summer's
growth and waning. She had not, at first, perhaps, known exactly when
things began to change for her--when the clarity of her mind began to be
disturbed. She had thought in the beginning--as people have a habit
of doing--that an instance--a problem--a situation had attracted her
attention because it was absorbing enough to think over. Her view of the
matter had been that as the same thing would have interested her father,
it had interested herself. But from the morning when she had been
conscious of the sudden fury roused in her by Nigel Anstruthers' ugly
sneer at Mount Dunstan, she had better understood the thing which had
come upon her. Day by day it had increased and gathered power, and she
realised with a certain sense of impatience that she had not in any
degree understood it when she had seen and wondered at its effect on
other women. Each day had been like a wave encroaching farther upon the
shore she