The Project Gutenberg eBook, Captivity, by M. Leonora Eyles

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Captivity

Author: M. Leonora Eyles

Release Date: April 2, 2005 [eBook #15527]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTIVITY***

E-text prepared by Michael Ciesielski, Project Gutenberg Beginners
Projects, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
Proofreading Team

CAPTIVITY

by

M. LEONORA EYLES

Author of _Margaret Protests_

1922

TO E. J. R-S.

You have often said that you could never write a book. You have written
this one just as surely as Beatrice wrote the Vita Nuova for Dante.
Until I talked with you I did not know that our lives are the pathway
for God's feet; I had not realized that Trinity of body, brain and
spirit; and it had never come to me before how, for each other's sake,
we must set a censor, very strong and austere, upon our secret thoughts.
I have learnt these things from you; the gold of your thoughts has
passed through the crucible of my experience to make a book. Perhaps a
little of the gold has been left clinging to the crucible--and for that
I have to thank you, my dear.

Margaret Leonora Eyles.

Bexhill-on-Sea, _1st February, 1920._

"Man comes into life to seek and find his sufficient beauty, to
serve it, to win and increase it, to fight for it; to face anything
and dare anything for it, counting death as nothing so long as the
dying eyes still turn to it. And fear and dulness and indolence and
appetite--which, indeed, are no more than fear's three crippled brothers
who make ambushes and creep by night--are against him, to delay him, to
hold him off, to hamper and beguile and kill him in that quest."

H. G. Wells ("The History of Mr. Polly").

Captivity

CHAPTER I

As long as Marcella could remember, the old farm-house had lain in
shadows, without and within.

Behind it rose the great height of Ben Grief, with his gaunt face gashed
here by glowering groups of conifers, there by burns that ran down to
the River Nagar like tears down a wrinkled old face. Marcella had read
in poetry books about burns that sang a