Do you remember how I used to talk of freedom?  But now I’m to be a bird in a cage.  It will be a gilded cage, of course.  Even Grace says that Constance’s home is charming—­great lovely rooms and massive furniture; and when we begin to go again into society, I am to be introduced to lots of grand folk, and perhaps presented.

And I am to forget that I ever worked in a grubby government office—­indeed I am to forget that I ever worked at all.

And I am to forget all of my dreams.  I am to change from the Mary Ballard who wanted to do things to the Mary Ballard who wants them done for her.  Perhaps when you see me again I shall be nice and clinging and as sweetly feminine as you used to want me to be—­Roger Poole.

The mists have cleared, and there’s a cloud on the horizon—­I can hear people saying that it means a storm.  Shall I be afraid?  I wonder.  Do you remember the storm that came that day in the garden and drove us in?  I wonder if we shall ever be together again in the dear old garden?

After the storm.

Last night the storm waked us.  It was a dreadful storm, with the wind booming, and the sea all whipped up into a whirlpool.

But I wasn’t frightened, although everybody was awake, and there was a feeling that something might happen.  I asked Porter to take me on deck, but he said that no one was allowed, and so we just curled up on chairs and sofas and waited either for the storm to end or for the ship to sink.  If you’ve ever been in a storm at sea, you know the feeling—­that the next minute may bring calm and safety, or terror and death.

Porter had tucked a rug around me, and I lay there, looking at the others, wondering whether if an accident happened Delilah would face death as gracefully as she faces everything else.  Leila was very white and shivery and clung to her father; it is at such times that she seems such a child.

Aunt Frances was fussy and blamed everybody from the captain down to Aunt Isabelle—­as if they could control the warring elements.  Surely it is a case of the “ruling passion.”

But while I am writing these things, I am putting off, and putting off and putting off the story of what happened after the storm—­not because I dread to tell it, but because I don’t know quite how to tell it.  It involves such intimate things—­yet it makes all things clear, it makes everything so beautifully clear, Roger Poole.

It was after the wind died down a bit that I made Porter take me up on deck.  The moon was flying through the ragged clouds, and the water was a wild sweep of black and white.  It was all quite spectral and terrifying and I shivered.  And then Porter said; “Mary, we’d better go down.”

And I said, “It wasn’t fear that made me shiver, Porter.  It was just the thought that living is worse than dying.”

He dropped my arm and looked down at me.

“Mary,” he said, “what’s the matter with you?”