Not via Marychurch to Harchester, well understood, shepherded by Theresa Bilson, the members of the Deadham Church choir and their supporters; but for travel upon the grand scale, with all its romance and enlargement of experience, its possible dangers and certain hardships, as the author of Eoethen had known it and her father, for that matter, had known it in earlier days too.

She suffered the spell of the East--always haunting the chambers of her memory and ready to be stirred in active ascendency, as by her morning's reading to-day--suffered the spell not of its mysterious cities and civilizations alone, but of its vast solitudes and silences, desert winds and desert sands.
And hence it came about that, as her mood of yesterday sent her inland to pacify her imagination by gazing at the peaceful English country-side, so her present mood sent her down to the shore to satisfy, or rather further stimulate, her nostalgia for the East by gazing out to sea.
The cause in both cases was the same, namely, the inward tumult of her awakening womanhood, and still more, perhaps, the tumult of awakening talent which had not as yet found its appointed means of expression.

She was driven hither and thither by the push of her individuality to disengage itself from adventitious surroundings and circumstances, and realize its independent existence .-- A somewhat perilous crisis of development, fruitful of escapades and unruly impulses which may leave their mark, and that a disfiguring one, upon the whole of a woman's subsequent career.
Immediately, however, Damaris' disposition to defy established convention and routine took the mildest and apparently most innocuous form--merely the making, by herself, of a little expedition which, accompanied by others, she had made a hundred times before.

From the terrace she went down the flight of steps, built into the width of the sea-wall, whence a tall wrought-iron gate opens direct upon the foreshore.

Closing it behind her, she followed the coastguard-path, at the base of the river-bank--here a miniature sand cliff capped with gravel, from eight to ten feet high--which leads to the warren and the ferry.