days had been full, at night she had gone to bed to sleep in happy
dreamlessness. The hotel bedrooms with their litter of trunks
suggesting imminent flight had held no restfulness. To Gillian the
transitory sensation had strained already over-excited nerves and
heightened the dreamlike feeling that made everything seem unreal.
But here, the visible evidences of travel removed, the deep
silence of a large country house penetrating her mind and
conducing to peace, she could think at last. The surroundings were
helpful. There was about the room an air of permanence which the
hotel bedrooms had never given, an atmosphere of abiding quiet
that soothed her. She was sensitive of an influence that was
wholly new to her and very sweet, that brought with it a feeling
of laughter and tears strangely mingled, that made the room appear
as no other room had ever done. It Was her room, and it had
welcomed her. It was like a big friendly silent person offering
mute reception, radiating repose. In a few hours the room had
become intimate, dear to her. She laughed happily--then checked at
a guilty feeling of treason against the grey old walls in Paris
that had so long sheltered her. She was not ungrateful, all her
life she would remember with gratitude the love and care she had
received. But the convent had been prison. Since her father had
left her there, a tiny child, she had inwardly rebelled; the life
was abhorrent to her, the restraint unbearable. With childish
pride she had hidden her feelings, living through a period of
acute misery with no hint to those about her of what she suffered.
And the habit of suppression acquired in childhood had grown with
her own development. As the years passed the limitations of the
convent became more perceptible. She felt its cramping influence
to the full, as if the walls were closing in to suffocate her, to
bury her alive before she had ever known a fuller freer life. She