As yet the girl herself was unconscious of her mother's new
watchfulness. She was happy in the coming of summer, and in her
happiness was quite at ease, like a kitten that stretches itself
luxuriously in the sun. To Vere the world never seemed quite awake
till the summer came. Only in the hot sunshine did there glow the
truthfulness and the fulness of life. She shared it with the ginestra.
She saw and felt a certain cruelty in the gold, but she did not fear
or condemn it, or wish it away. For she was very young, and though she
spoke of cruelty she did not really understand it. In it there was
force, and force already appealed to the girl as few things did. As,
long ago, her father had gloried in the coming of summer to the South,
she gloried in it now. She looked across the Pool of the Saint to the
flood of yellow that was like sunlight given a body upon the cliff
opposite, and her soul revelled within her, and her heart rose up and
danced, alone, and yet as if in a glad company of dancers, all of whom
were friends. Her brain, too, sprang to the alert. The sun increased
the feeling of intelligence within her.

And then she thought of her room, of the hours she passed shut in
there, and she was torn by opposing impulses.

But she told no one of them. Vere could keep her secrets although she
was a girl.

How the sea welcomed the summer! To many this home on the island would
have seemed an arid, inhospitable place, desolate and lost amid a
cruel world of cliffs and waters. It was not so to Vere. For she
entered into the life of the sea. She knew all its phases, as one may
know all the moods of a person loved. She knew when she would find it
intensely calm, at early morning and when the evening approached. At a