lighter, more exhilarating.

From the convent her mind went back to earlier days. She thought of her
father, the handsome dissolute man, whose image had grown dim with
years. As a tiny child she had loved him passionately, the central
figure of her chequered and wandering little life--father and mother
in one, playmate and hero. Her recollection seemed to be of constant
travelling; of long hours spent in railway trains; of arrivals at
strange places in the dark night; of departures in the early dawn,
half awake--but always happy so long as the familiar arms held her
weary little body and there was the shabby old coat on which to pillow
her brown curls. A jumbled remembrance of towns and country villages;
of kind unknown women who looked compassionate and murmured over her
in a dozen different languages. It had all been a medley of impressions
and experiences--everything transient, nothing lasting, but the big
untidy man who was her all. And then the convent. For a few years
John Locke had reappeared at irregular intervals, and on the memory
of those brief visits she had lived until he came again. Then he had
ceased to come and his letters, grown short and few, full of vague
promises--unsatisfying--meagre, had stopped abruptly. At first she
had refused to admit to herself that he had forgotten, that she could
mean so little to him, that he would deliberately put her out of his
life. She had waited, excusing, trusting, until, heart-sick with
deferred hope, she had come to think of him as dead. She was old
enough then to realise her position and in spite of the love and
consideration surrounding her she had learned misery. Her popularity
even was a source of torment, for in the happy homes of her friends
she had felt more cruelly her own destitute loneliness.

When the lawyer's letter had come enclosing a few scrawled lines