And not only did faith thus call her, at this period, but art, in its many forms, called her likewise.  The two, indeed, according to her present understanding of them, moved—­though at different levels—­side by side, singularly conjoined, art translating faith into terms of sound, form and colour, faith consecrating and supplementing art.  All of which, as she pondered, appeared to her only fitting and reasonable—­the object of art being to capture beauty and touch reality, the substance of faith being nothing less than beauty and reality absolute.

With Sir Charles sometimes, but more often with her aunt, Miss Felicia—­most enthusiastic, diligent and ingenuous of sightseers—­she visited buildings of historic interest, galleries of statuary and of pictures.  For here, too, in architecture, in marble god or hero, upon painted panel or canvas, she caught, at moments, some flickering shadow of the everlasting light, touched at moments both by its abiding terror and the ecstasy of its everlasting youth.  But this appreciation of the height and grandeur of man’s endeavour was new in her.  To Nature she had from childhood, been curiously near.  She sought expression and confirmation of it with silent ardour, her mind aflame with the joy of recognition.  And, as daily, hourly background to these her many experiments and excursions, was the stable interest of her father’s book.  For in the pages of that, too, she caught sight of beauty and reality of no mean order, held nobly to ransom through the medium of words.

And while this high humour still possessed her, alive at every point, her thoughts—­often by day, still oftener in dreams or wakeful intervals by night—­rapt away beyond the stars, she was called upon, as already noted, to pass abruptly from the dynamic to the static mode.  Called on to embrace domestic duties, and meet local social obligations, including polite endurance of long-drawn disquisitions regarding Canon Horniblow’s impending curate.  The drop proved disconcerting, or would have eminently done so had not another element—­disquieting yet very dear—­come into play.

Meantime the change from the stimulating continental atmosphere to the particularly soft and humid, not to say stagnant, English one, acted as a drop too.  She drooped during the process of acclimatization.  The fetid sweet reek off the mud-flats of the Haven oppressed and strangely pursued her, so that she asked for the horses to take her to the freshness of the high lying inland moors, for a boat to carry her across the tide-river to the less confined air and outlook of the Bar.  Sight and sense of the black wooden houses, upon the forbidden island, hanging like disreputable boon companions about the grey stone-built inn, oppressed and strangely pursued her too.  She could see them from her bedroom between the red trunks of the bird-haunted Scotch firs in the Wilderness.  First thing, on clear mornings, the sunlight glittered on the glass of their small windows.  Last thing,