Remembering this speech of her mother, ominously clear as speeches seem which have been long forgotten and then are suddenly recalled, she felt disconcerted for the second time, that morning. It was true, of course, that she had always dreaded the sea. Every kind of evil of which it was capable had seemed at one time or another to fasten upon her imagination. Accounts of shipwrecks held her as no other literature had power to hold her,--tidal waves, broken embankments, water-spouts moving like monstrous spectres.... The sea was the only thing in life which had so far been able to intimidate her, and she had not yet mastered her fear of it. Not easily would she forget those bad days after her children had sailed, or the unbelievable relief with which she had heard that the ground was firm again under their feet. And now she was definitely committed to cross that very ocean which had driven the Colonies out of a cottage talk all those years ago! Even in the midst of her luminous satisfaction she shivered as she remembered it. The sea frightened you, made you sick, heaved you about, and then finally drowned you.... Not, of course, that she anticipated being drowned,--the dream alone seemed surety enough for that--but she knew that she would suffer it a hundred times in her mind before she was safely landed. Yet it had to be faced if ever she was to know the happiness that was waiting for her, Over There.... She felt a pang of impatience because she could not make the journey as she had just made it in the night,--as she had made it many and many a time over her cooking or her needle. Yet what were a few days of misery, after all, compared with the long heart-breaking years through which she had struggled already? The picture called up by her aunt had faded as soon as it was painted, not only blotted out by the terrors of the sea, but dwindling from sheer vagueness. She had had that one hint of a door wider than any of those which she opened daily, and then it was closed again before she could see beyond it. One glimpse, followed by a single pang of recognition and disappointment ... and presently she had forgotten it. In any case, she would have had little use for the Colonies, just then, for already she was aware that she meant to marry Kirkby. Looking back, she could see him coming into her life as softly as the river mists which lay so often upon the gardens, and which she so much dreaded and hated. She could not remember either the day she had first met him, or the still more important day when he had asked her to marry him. All that she knew was that he had not been in her life, and then suddenly he was all of it. She could no more trace the moment when that had happened than she had ever been able to catch a tulip closing for the night.