Meantime the change from the stimulating continental atmosphere to the particularly soft and humid, not to say stagnant, English one, acted as a drop too. She drooped during the process of acclimatization. The fetid sweet reek off the mud-flats of the Haven oppressed and strangely pursued her, so that she asked for the horses to take her to the freshness of the high lying inland moors, for a boat to carry her across the tide-river to the less confined air and outlook of the Bar. Sight and sense of the black wooden houses, upon the forbidden island, hanging like disreputable boon companions about the grey stone-built inn, oppressed and strangely pursued her too. She could see them from her bedroom between the red trunks of the bird-haunted Scotch firs in the Wilderness. First thing, on clear mornings, the sunlight glittered on the glass of their small windows. Last thing, at night, the dim glow of lamp-light showed through open doorway, or flimsy curtain from within. They stood alone, but curiously united and self-sufficing, upon the treeless inhospitable piece of land, ringed by the rivers, the great whispering reed-beds and the tide. Their life was strangely apart from, defiant of, that of the mainland and the village. It yielded obedience to traditions and customs of an earlier, wilder age; and in so much was sinister, a little frightening. Yet out of precisely this rather primitive and archaic environment came Darcy Faircloth, her half-brother, the human being closest to her by every tie of blood and sentiment in the world save one--the father of them both. The situation was startling, alike in its incongruities and in its claims. During those two years of continental wandering--following upon her meeting with him at Marseilles--the whole sweet and perplexing matter of Faircloth had fallen more or less into line, taking on a measure of simplicity and of ease. She thought of him with freedom, wrote to him when he could advise her of his next port of call.--To him at Deadham, by his request, he being very careful for her, she never wrote.--And therefore, all the more perhaps, being here at Deadham, his home and all the suggestive accessories of it so constantly before her eyes, did her relation to him suffer a painful transformation. In remembrance she had come to picture him on board his ship, governing his little floating kingdom with no feeble or hesitating sway. But here every impeding fact of class and education, every worldly obstacle to his and her intercourse, above all the hidden scandal of his birth sprang into high relief. All the dividing, alienating influences of his antecedents, his social position and her own, swung in upon her with aggravated intensity and pathos.