Her strange upbringing may have contributed to such morbid fancies. In his
monstrous preoccupation with a single idea Robert Turold had neglected his
duty to his daughter. She counted for nothing in his scheme of life, and
there were periods when he seemed to be unconscious of her existence. She
had been allowed to grow up with very little education or training. She
had passed her childhood and girlhood in remote parts of England, without
companions, and nobody to talk to except her mother and Thalassa, who
accompanied the family everywhere. She loved her mother, but her love was
embittered 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