She was too agitated to think; life, being, was one wide, vague sensation, partly delight, partly trepidation.
Everything had a bright tremulousness.

This mystery was no dark cloud, it was a shaking, glittering mist, and yet there rose from it an air which made her pulse beat hard, her breath come with joyous lightness.
She was growing to a new consciousness; a new glass, through which to see life, was quickly being adjusted to her inner sight.
Many a time, with her mother, she had sat upon the shore at St.Aubin's Bay, and looked out where white sails fluttered like the wings of restless doves.

Nearer, maybe just beneath her, there had risen the keen singing of the saw, and she could see the white flash of the adze as it shaped the beams; the skeleton of a noble ship being covered with its flesh of wood, and veined with iron; the tall masts quivering to their places as the workmen hauled at the pulleys, singing snatches of patois rhymes.

She had seen more than one ship launched, and a strange shiver of pleasure and of pain had gone through her; for as the water caught the graceful figure of the vessel, and the wind bellied out the sails, it seemed to her as if some ship of her own hopes were going out between the reefs to the open sea.

What would her ship bring back again to her?
Or would anything ever come back?
The books of adventure, poetry, history, and mythology she had read with her mother had quickened her mind, sharpened her intuition, had made her temperament still more sensitive--and her heart less peaceful.