Sisily knew this story, and believed it to be true.  Sometimes, when the moon lingered on the black glistening surface of the Moon Rock, she fancied she could see a misty fluttering figure on the rock, and hear it calling ... calling.  She would sit motionless at her window, straining her ears for the reply.  After a time the response would come faintly from the sea, at first far out, then sounding louder and clearer as the spirit of the husband guided his drowned body back to his wife’s arms.  When it sounded close to the rock the evanescent figure on the summit would vanish to join the spirit of her husband in the churning waters at the base.  Then the face of the Moon Rock seemed to smile, and the smile was so cruel that Sisily would turn from the window with a shudder, covering her face with her hands.

Her strange upbringing may have contributed to such morbid fancies.  In his monstrous preoccupation with a single idea Robert Turold had neglected his duty to his daughter.  She counted for nothing in his scheme of life, and there were periods when he seemed to be unconscious of her existence.  She had been allowed to grow up with very little education or training.  She had passed her childhood and girlhood in remote parts of England, without companions, and nobody to talk to except her mother and Thalassa, who accompanied the family everywhere.  She loved her mother, but her love was embittered by her helplessness to mitigate her mother’s unhappy lot.  Thalassa was a savage old pagan whose habitual watchful secretiveness relaxed into roaring melody in his occasional cups; in neither aspect could he be considered a suitable companion for the budding mind of a girl, but he loomed in her thoughts as a figure of greater import than her father or mother.  Her father was a gloomy recluse, her mother was crushed and broken in spirit.  Thalassa had been the practical head of the house ever since Sisily could remember anything, an autocrat who managed the domestic economy of their strange household in his own way, and brooked no interference.  “Ask Thalassa—­Thalassa will know,” was Robert Turold’s unvarying formula when anybody attempted to fix upon him his responsibility as head of the house.  Sometimes Sisily was under the impression that her father for some reason or other, feared Thalassa.  She could recall a chance collision, witnessed unseen, through a half-open door.  There had been loud voices, and she had seen a fiery threatening eye—­Thalassa’s—­and her; father’s moody averted face.

From a child she had developed in her own way, as wild and wayward as the gulls which swooped around the rocks where she was sitting.  Nature revealed her heart to her in long solitary walks by sea and fen.  But of the world of men and women Sisily knew nothing whatever.  The secrets of the huddle of civilization are not to be gathered from books or solitude.  Sisily was completely unsophisticated in the ways of the world, and her deep passionate temperament was full of latent capacity for good or evil, for her soul’s salvation or shipwreck.  Because of her upbringing and temperament she was not the girl to count the cost in anything she did.  She was a being of impulse who had never learnt restraint, who would act first and think afterwards.