Perhaps it was only a waxen image she saw, or a wraith in that long dream of hers, of which she could not quite remember the beginning.

She knew that she was nothing to the image, and that it was nothing to her.
While her lips repeated the grand dirge of the King-poet in Saint Jerome's noble old Latin words, her thoughts followed broken threads, each cut short by a question that lacks an answer, by the riddle man has asked of the sky and the sea and the earth since the beginning: What does it mean?
What could it mean?
The senseless facts were there, plain enough.
That morning she had seen her father, she had kissed his hand in the old-fashioned way, and he had kissed her forehead, and they had exchanged a few words, as usual.

She remembered that for the thousandth time she had wished that his voice would soften a little and that he would put his arms round her and draw her closer to him.

But he had been just as always, for he was bound and stiffened in the unwieldy armour of his conventional righteousness.

Angela had read of the Puritans in history, and an Englishman might smile at the thought that she could not fancy the sternest of them as more thoroughly puritanical than her father, who had been brought up by priests from his childhood.