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 the huddle of civilization are not to be gathered from books or solitude.
Sisily was completely unsophisticated in the ways of the world, and her deep passionate temperament was full of latent capacity for good or evil, for her soul's salvation or shipwreck.