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the truth.
    Anna could not have told when it began; when first she was aware that something new and rather sinister had crept into her relations with her father: a new element. The element of fear. Perhaps it had started on the day of the shooting, when she had stood with her back to the goat-shed in the voluptuous yellow glare of the sunset. Or perhaps it had been born long before, with its thin roots like black worms twisted into the far distant past. But somehow fear had risen. And now its ugly, flat, dangerous head was always rearing up at her out of the bland innocuousness of everyday, as the venomous little vipers would suddenly poke up, hissing, from the sun-warmed rocks.
    It was lonely at Mascarat, and the wind came swooping down from the mountains, making wild, maritime noises in the chestnut-forest, shuddering and whining through the draughty old house. Anna had never realized till now the isolation, the complete, black isolation that shut her up alone with her father, absolutely, like the banging of a trap-door. Particularly at night.
    By nine o’clock Seguela and Paul would have vanished into their black hole. When there was no wind the house was silent, curiously, stonily silent, as if dead. And Anna, lying on her bed in the dark, would be acutely conscious of her father who sat in the other room in the meagre, dusky light of the lamp, reading, reading; or filling the pages of his diary with the small, beautiful Greek letters that he formed so perfectly. Till somehow his stooping form would become a nightmare to her, a terrifying menace of the night, so that she could hardly bear to feel herselfshut up with him, alone in the absolute silence of the dark house.
    Gradually, this obscure terror, this intangible, indescribable nightmare fear, began to make itself felt by day also. Anna became nervous in her father’s presence. She developed a vague, increasing dread of him. She would not acknowledge it; she fought with a kind of shame against this insidious, black, sliding intrusion. But it persisted. And somehow, the uneasiness of the child seemed to communicate itself to the man also. His attitude towards Anna became subtly modified. The old understanding between them, the blood-sympathy, was lost; he withdrew himself from her. And at the same time, he watched her, secretly it seemed, as one might spy upon an enemy; or a victim.
    He was no longer harsh with her or scornfully sarcastic as before. He was always quiet and restrained, and gentle, too strangely gentle, in his manner. But he was so preoccupied; he seemed to forget Anna more and more, and to become always stranger and more absorbed in his own thoughts. And sometimes he sat staring at her in a way that made her afraid. She was afraid of his secret thoughts with which she felt that she was in some way connected.
    Anna was fond of bathing in the stream where the water had been dammed back with stones to make a basin about twelve feet across. There was room to swim a few strokes, and the water was vividly clear. It was pleasant when the weather was hot to splash about in the water that came down, pure, pure melted snow from the mountains, and then to lie in the biting glare of the sun on the dry grass. Like a young pagan creature from some long-lost era before the world became vulnerable in the consciousness of sex, Anna lay on the warm grass in the sun. Her slim, hard, brown-skinned body looked small and childish in theblazing light, very pure and impersonal, with a certain primitive unearthliness of virginity. As the first dwellers on the earth might have looked in the bright, pristine freshness of creation.
    Her father came to watch her. He had developed a habit, lately, of coming down to the stream while she was bathing. There he would sit under the cherry tree, isolated in a black ring of shadow, while all the world swam unsubstantially in a great flood of light. He did not speak to her, but his eyes, his bright grey eyes, would gleam out of the shadow,