She determined to say no prayer to such a ruthless Being; yet, soon
after, in her coarse nightgown, she found herself kneeling by the bed
with hard-clasped hands. It was a prayer for which Barzil Dunsack would
have had nothing but condemnation: she implored the dark, the mystery of
Augustness, for carnal and light things, yes--for waltzes and quadrilles
and songs and pleasure, young pleasure, all the aching desires of her
health and spirit and nature and years; but most for love. She said the
last blindly, in an instinct without definition, with the feeling that it
was the key, the door, to everything else; and in her mind rose the image
of Gerrit Ammidon. She saw his firm direct countenance, the frosty blue
eyes and human warmth. He needn't have come at all, she added, if it had
been only to double the dreariness of her existence.

She wondered a little, her emotion subsiding, at the interest her uncle
showed in her affairs. It wasn't like what else she had gathered of him;
and she searched, but without success, for any hidden reason he might
have. He actively blackened the name of Ammidon while he was lost in too
great an indifference to be moved by any but extraordinary pressures.
Everything left his mind, as her mother had said, almost immediately.
Suddenly weary, she gave up all effort at understanding.

A wind moved in from the sea, fluttering the light curtains, and brought
her a sense of coolness and release. It came from the immense free sweep
of ocean to which her sinking consciousness turned in peaceful
recognition and surrender.

Altogether, in the days that followed, she realized a greater degree of
mental freedom than before her revolt. She had removed herself, it
appeared, a little outside the family, almost as if she were studying
them calmly through a window: a large part of the terror her grandfather