“There are but two in the world who ever listen and try to help me; one of them is my grandfather, and the other is a man of wisdom, whom we call the Counsellor.  My grandfather, Sir Ensor Doone, is very old and harsh of manner (except indeed to me); he seems to know what is right and wrong, but not to want to think of it.  The Counsellor, on the other hand, though full of life and subtleties, treats my questions as of play, and not gravely worth his while to answer, unless he can make wit of them.

“And among the women there are none with whom I can hold converse, since my Aunt Sabina died, who took such pains to teach me.  She was a lady of high repute and lofty ways, and learning, but grieved and harassed more and more by the coarseness, and the violence, and the ignorance around her.  In vain she strove, from year to year, to make the young men hearken, to teach them what became their birth, and give them sense of honour.  It was her favourite word, poor thing! and they called her ’Old Aunt Honour.’  Very often she used to say that I was her only comfort, and I am sure she was my only one; and when she died it was more to me than if I had lost a mother.

“For I have no remembrance now of father or of mother, although they say that my father was the eldest son of Sir Ensor Doone, and the bravest and the best of them.  And so they call me heiress to this little realm of violence; and in sorry sport sometimes, I am their Princess or their Queen.

“Many people living here, as I am forced to do, would perhaps be very happy, and perhaps I ought to be so.  We have a beauteous valley, sheltered from the cold of winter and power of the summer sun, untroubled also by the storms and mists that veil the mountains; although I must acknowledge that it is apt to rain too often.  The grass moreover is so fresh, and the brook so bright and lively, and flowers of so many hues come after one another that no one need be dull, if only left alone with them.

“And so in the early days perhaps, when morning breathes around me, and the sun is going upward, and light is playing everywhere, I am not so far beside them all as to live in shadow.  But when the evening gathers down, and the sky is spread with sadness, and the day has spent itself; then a cloud of lonely trouble falls, like night, upon me.  I cannot see the things I quest for of a world beyond me; I cannot join the peace and quiet of the depth above me; neither have I any pleasure in the brightness of the stars.

“What I want to know is something none of them can tell me—­what am I, and why set here, and when shall I be with them?  I see that you are surprised a little at this my curiosity.  Perhaps such questions never spring in any wholesome spirit.  But they are in the depths of mine, and I cannot be quit of them.

“Meantime, all around me is violence and robbery, coarse delight and savage pain, reckless joke and hopeless death.  Is it any wonder that I cannot sink with these, that I cannot so forget my soul, as to live the life of brutes, and die the death more horrible because it dreams of waking?  There is none to lead me forward, there is none to teach me right; young as I am, I live beneath a curse that lasts for ever.”