Sisily first opened her eyes on a grey day by a grim coast, and life had always been grim and grey to her.

Her memory was a blurred record of wanderings from place to place in pursuit of something which was never to be found.

Her earliest recollection was of a bleak eastern coast, where Robert Turold had spent long years in a losing game of patience with the sea.

He had gone there in the belief that some of his ancestors were buried in a forgotten churchyard on the cliffs, and he spent his time attempting to decipher inscriptions which had been obliterated almost as effectually as the dead whose remains they extolled.
The old churchyard had been called "The Garden of Rest" by some sentimental versifier, but there was no rest for the dead who tried to sleep within its broken walls.

The sea kept undermining the crumbling cliffs upon which it stood, carrying away earth, and tombstones, and bones.