by her helplessness to mitigate her mother's unhappy lot.
Thalassa was a savage old pagan whose habitual watchful secretiveness
relaxed into roaring melody in his occasional cups; in neither aspect
could he be considered a suitable companion for the budding mind of a
girl, but he loomed in her thoughts as a figure of greater import than her
father or mother. Her father was a gloomy recluse, her mother was crushed
and broken in spirit. Thalassa had been the practical head of the house
ever since Sisily could remember anything, an autocrat who managed the
domestic economy of their strange household in his own way, and brooked no
interference. "Ask Thalassa--Thalassa will know," was Robert Turold's
unvarying formula when anybody attempted to fix upon him his
responsibility as head of the house. Sometimes Sisily was under the
impression that her father for some reason or other, feared Thalassa. She
could recall a chance collision, witnessed unseen, through a half-open
door. There had been loud voices, and she had seen a fiery threatening
eye--Thalassa's--and her; father's moody averted face.

From a child she had developed in her own way, as wild and wayward as the
gulls which swooped around the rocks where she was sitting. Nature
revealed her heart to her in long solitary walks by sea and fen. But of
the world of men and women Sisily knew nothing whatever. The secrets of
the huddle of civilization are not to be gathered from books or solitude.
Sisily was completely unsophisticated in the ways of the world, and her
deep passionate temperament was full of latent capacity for good or evil,
for her soul's salvation or shipwreck. Because of her upbringing and
temperament she was not the girl to count the cost in anything she did.
She was a being of impulse who had never learnt restraint, who would act
first and think afterwards.

Her dislike of her father was instinctive, almost impersonal, being based,
indeed, on his treatment of her mother rather than on any resentment of
his neglect of herself. But Robert Turold had never been able to
intimidate his daughter or tame her fearless spirit. She had inherited too
much of his own nature for that.

At that moment she was sitting motionless, immersed in thought, her chin
on her hand, looking across the water to the horizon, where the Scilly
Islands shimmered and disappeared in a grey, melting mist. She did not
hear the sound of Charles Turold's footsteps, descending the cliff path