Formerly, when there was choir practice at St. Joseph’s, she used to go there and meet her father, but lately, for some reason which she could not explain to herself, she had refrained.  The thought of this church had become distasteful to her, and she returned home indifferent to everything, to music and religion alike.  Her eyes turned from the pile of volumes—­part of Bach’s interminable works—­and all the old furniture, and she stood at the window and watched the rain dripping into the patch of black garden in front of the house, surrounded by a low stone wall.  The villas opposite suggested a desolation which found a parallel in her heart; the sloppy road and the pale brown sky frightened her, so menacing seemed their monotony.  She knew all this suburb; it was all graven on her mind, and all that ornamental park where she must go, if it cleared a little, for her afternoon walk.  She must tramp round that park once more.  She strove to keep out of her mind its symmetrical walls, its stone basins, where the swans floated like white china ornaments, almost as lifeless.  But worse even than these afternoons were the hours between six and eight.  For very often her father was detained, and if he missed the half-past six train he had to come by the half-past seven, and in those hours of waiting the dusk grew oppressive and fearful in the music-room.  Startled by a strange shadow, she crouched in her armchair, and when the feeling of dread passed she was weak from want of food.  Why did her father keep her waiting?  Hungry, faint and weary of life, she opened a volume of Bach; but there was no pleasure for her in the music, and if she opened a volume of songs she had neither strength nor will to persevere even through the first, and, rising from the instrument, she walked across the room, stretching her arms in a feverish despair.  She had not eaten for many hours, and out of the vacuity of the stomach a dimness rose into her eyes.  Pressing her eyes with her hand, she leaned against the door.

One evening she walked into the garden.  The silence and damp of the earth revived her, and the sensation of the cold stone, against which she was leaning, was agreeable.  Little stars speckled a mauve and misty sky, and out of the mysterious spring twilight there came a strange and ultimate yearning, a craving which nothing she had ever known could assuage.  But those stars—­could they tell her nothing?  One, large almost as the moon itself, flamed up in the sky, and a voice within her whispered that that was her star, that it held the secret of her destiny.  She gazed till her father called to her from the gate; and all that evening she could think of nothing else.  The conviction flowed within her that the secret of her destiny was there; and as she lay in bed the star seemed to take a visible shape.