house, where everything was modern, and polished, and varnished, and
in perfect condition, suggesting that things had been just paid for.
She had not liked the old life, but she liked her present surroundings
even less, and at times she felt a furious longing to leave them
suddenly, without warning; to go out when no one would notice her, and
never to come back; to go she knew not where, out into the world,
risking she knew not what, a high-born, penniless, fair-haired girl
not yet eighteen.

What would happen, if she did? She rarely laughed, but she would laugh
at that, when she thought of the consternation her flight would
produce. How puzzled the fat Baron would look, how the Baroness's thin
mouth would be drawn down at the corners! How the invisible silk
bellows would puff as she ran up and down stairs, searching the house
for Sabina!

There was more than one strain of wild blood in the delicate girl's
veins, and the spring had come suddenly, with a bursting out of
blossom and life and colour, and a twittering of nesting birds in the
old gardens, and a rush of strange longings in her heart.

Then Sabina told herself that there was nothing to keep her where she
was, but her own will, and that no one would really care what became
of her in the wide world; certainly not her mother, who had never
written her so much as a line, nor sent her a message, since they had
parted on the day of the catastrophe; certainly not her brother;
probably not even her sister, whose whole being was absorbed in the
tyrannical government of what she called her soul. Sabina, in her
thoughts, irreverently compared Clementina's soul to a race-horse, and
her sister to a jockey, riding it cruelly with whip and spur to the