under the influence of a sorrow which still was joy, and a joy that still
was sorrow, her vision became acute and piercing. Her mind was like some
kaleidoscope. Pictures of things, little and big, which had happened to
her in her life, flashed by her inner vision in furious procession. It
was as if, in the photographic machinery of the brain, some shutter had
slipped from its place, and a hundred orderless and ungoverned pictures,
loosed from natural restraint, rushed by.

Five months had gone since Philip had left her: two months since
she had received his second letter, months of complexity of feeling;
of tremulousness of discovery; of hungry eagerness for news of the war;
of sudden little outbursts of temper in her household life--a new thing
in her experience; of passionate touches of tenderness towards her
grandfather; of occasional biting comments in the conversations between
the Sieur and the Chevalier, causing both gentlemen to look at each other
in silent amaze; of as marked lapses into listless disregard of any talk
going on around her.

She had been used often to sit still, doing nothing, in a sort of
physical content, as the Sieur and his visitors talked; now her hands
were always busy, knitting, sewing, or spinning, the steady gaze upon the
work showing that her thoughts were far away. Though the Chevalier and
her grandfather vaguely noted these changes, they as vaguely set them
down to her growing womanhood. In any case, they held it was not for
them to comment upon a woman or upon a woman's ways. And a girl like
Guida was an incomprehensible being, with an orbit and a system all her
own; whose sayings and doings were as little to be reduced to their
understandings as the vagaries of any star in the Milky Way or the
currents in St. Michael's Basin.