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 brink of a broken Cornish
cliffline, above the grey surges of the Atlantic, among a wilderness of
dark rocks, facing black moors, which rolled away from the cliffs as
lonely and desolate as eternity. The place had been built by a London
artist, long since dead, who had lived there and painted seascapes from an
upstairs studio which overlooked the sea.

The house had remained empty for years until Robert Turold had taken it
six months before. It was too isolated and lonely to gain a permanent