Chapter I
A Summons in the Night





It all seemed so real that I could hardly imagine that it had ever
occurred before; and yet each episode came, not as a fresh step in the
logic of things, but as something expected. It is in such a wise that
memory plays its pranks for good or ill; for pleasure or pain; for weal
or woe. It is thus that life is bittersweet, and that which has been
done becomes eternal.

Again, the light skiff, ceasing to shoot through the lazy water as when
the oars flashed and dripped, glided out of the fierce July sunlight
into the cool shade of the great drooping willow branches--I standing up
in the swaying boat, she sitting still and with deft fingers guarding
herself from stray twigs or the freedom of the resilience of moving
boughs. Again, the water looked golden-brown under the canopy of
translucent green; and the grassy bank was of emerald hue. Again, we
sat in the cool shade, with the myriad noises of nature both without and
within our bower merging into that drowsy hum in whose sufficing
environment the great world with its disturbing trouble, and its more
disturbing joys, can be effectually forgotten. Again, in that blissful
solitude the young girl lost the convention of her prim, narrow
upbringing, and told me in a natural, dreamy way of the loneliness of
her new life. With an undertone of sadness she made me feel how in that
spacious home each one of the household was isolated by the personal
magnificence of her father and herself; that there confidence had no