side of the house.

CHAPTER IV

Sisily first opened her eyes on a grey day by a grim coast, and life had
always been grim and grey to her. Her memory was a blurred record of
wanderings from place to place in pursuit of something which was never to
be found. Her earliest recollection was of a bleak eastern coast, where
Robert Turold had spent long years in a losing game of patience with the
sea. He had gone there in the belief that some of his ancestors were
buried in a forgotten churchyard on the cliffs, and he spent his time
attempting to decipher inscriptions which had been obliterated almost as
effectually as the dead whose remains they extolled.

The old churchyard had been called "The Garden of Rest" by some
sentimental versifier, but there was no rest for the dead who tried to
sleep within its broken walls. The sea kept undermining the crumbling
cliffs upon which it stood, carrying away earth, and tombstones, and
bones. Nor was it a garden. Nothing grew in the dank air but crawling
things which were horrible to the eye. There were great rank growths of
toadstools, yellow, blue, livid white, or spotted like adders, which
squirmed and squelched underfoot to send up a sickly odour of decay. The
only green thing was some ivy, a parasitic vampire which drew its
lifeblood from the mouldering corpse of an old church.

It was in this desolate place that the girl conceived her first impression
of her father as a stern and silent man who burrowed among old graves like
a mole. Robert Turold had fought a stout battle for the secret contained
in those forgotten graves on a bleak headland, but the sea had beaten him
in the long run, carrying off the stones piecemeal until only one
remained, a sturdy pillar of granite which marked the bones of one who,
some hundred and fifty years before had been "An English Gentleman and a
Christian"--so much of the epitaph remained. Robert Turold hoped that it
was an ancestor, but he was not destined to know. One night the stone was
carried off with a great splash which was heard far, and left a ragged gap
in the cliffside, like a tooth plucked from a giant's mouth.

When Sisily first saw the cliffs of Cornwall she was reminded of those
early days, with the difference that the Cornish granite rocks stood firm,
as though saying to the sea, "Here rises England."

The house Robert Turold had taken looked down on the sea from the summit.
It was a strange place to build a house, on the