may surge and roar but there
peace reigns. In that sanctuary the tides are born and, in their
appointed time, swelling and rising, they carry the poor jetsam and
flotsam of life before them.

The tide was rising in the soul of Meredith Thornton; she was awake at
last. Awake as people are who have lived with their faculties drugged.
The condition was partly due to the education and training of the woman,
and largely to her own ability in the past to close her senses to any
conception of life that differed from her desires. She had always been
like that. She loved beauty and music; she loved goodness and happiness;
she loved them whom she loved so well that she shut all others out.
Consequently, when Life tore her defences away she had no guidance upon
which to depend but that which had lain hidden in the secret place of
her soul.

As a little child Meredith and her older sister, Doris, lived in New
York. Their house had been in the Fletcher family for three generations
and stood at the end of a dignified row, opposite a park whose iron
gates opened only to those considered worthy of owning a key--the
Fletchers had a key!

In the park the little Fletcher girls played--if one could call it
play--under the eye of a carefully selected maid whose glance was
expected to rest constantly upon them. The anxious father tried to do
his double duty conscientiously, for the mother had died at Meredith's
birth.

The children often peered through the high fence (it really was more fun
than the stupid games directed by their elders) and wondered--at least
Doris wondered; Meredith was either amused or shocked; if the latter it
was an easy matter to turn aside. This hurt Doris, and to her plea that
the thing was there, Meredith returned that she did not believe it, and
she did not, either.

Once, shielded by the skirts of an outgoing maid, Doris made her escape
and, for two thrilling and enlightening hours, revelled in the company
of the Great Unknown who were not deemed worthy of keys.

Doris had found them vital, absorbing, and human; they changed the whole
current of her life and thought; she was never the same again, neither
was anything else.

The nurse was at once dismissed and Mr. Fletcher placed his daughters in
the care of Sister Angela, who was then at the head of a fashionable
school for girls--St. Mary's, it was called.

Sister Angela believed in keys but had ideas as to their uses and the
good sense to keep them o