but more often with her aunt, Miss
Felicia--most enthusiastic, diligent and ingenuous of sightseers--she
visited buildings of historic interest, galleries of statuary and of
pictures. For here, too, in architecture, in marble god or hero, upon
painted panel or canvas, she caught, at moments, some flickering shadow
of the everlasting light, touched at moments both by its abiding terror
and the ecstasy of its everlasting youth. But this appreciation of the
height and grandeur of man's endeavour was new in her. To Nature she had
from childhood, been curiously near. She sought expression and
confirmation of it with silent ardour, her mind aflame with the joy of
recognition. And, as daily, hourly background to these her many
experiments and excursions, was the stable interest of her father's book.
For in the pages of that, too, she caught sight of beauty and reality of
no mean order, held nobly to ransom through the medium of words.

And while this high humour still possessed her, alive at every point,
her thoughts--often by day, still oftener in dreams or wakeful
intervals by night--rapt away beyond the stars, she was called upon, as
already noted, to pass abruptly from the dynamic to the static mode.
Called on to embrace domestic duties, and meet local social
obligations, including polite endurance of long-drawn disquisitions
regarding Canon Horniblow's impending curate. The drop proved
disconcerting, or would have eminently done so had not another
element--disquieting yet very dear--come into play.

Meantime the change from the stimulating continental atmosphere to the
particularly soft and humid, not to say stagnant, English one, acted as a
drop too. She drooped during the process of acclimatization. The fetid
sweet reek off the mud-flats of the Haven oppressed and strangely pursued
her, so that she asked for the horses to take her to the freshness of the
high lying inland moors, for a boat to carry her across the tide-river to
the less confined air and outlook of the Bar. Sight and sense of the
black wooden houses, upon the forbidden island, hanging like disreputable
boon companions about the grey stone-built inn, oppressed and strangely
pursued her too. She could see them from her bedroom between the red
trunks of the bird-haunted Scotch firs in the Wilderness. First thing, on
clear mornings, the sunlight glittered on the glass of their small
windows. Last thing, at night, the dim glow of lamp-light showed through
ope