She found much matter for wonder and for fear.
Visible Nature had grown to be a smiling curtain behind which raged eternal
struggles for life. Every leaf sheltered a tragedy, every bough was a
battlefield. The awful frailty of all existence began to dawn upon Joan
Tregenza, and the discovery left her helpless, lonely, longing for new
gods. She knew not where to turn. Any brightness from any source had been
welcome then.
Disenchantment came with the second visit of the artist to the stream.
There; young Murdoch had met her and told her that "Mister Jan" was going
to write her a letter. Upon which she had sung glad songs in a sunlit world
and amazed Mary and Uncle Chirgwin alike by the exhibition of a sudden and
profound happiness. But that longed-for letter never came; weeks passed by;
the truth rolled up over her life at last; and, as a world seen in a blaze
of sunshine only dazzles us and conceals its facts under too much light,
but reveals the same clear cut and distinct at dawn or early twilight, so
now Joan's eyes, obscured no more by the blinding promise of great joy,
began to see her world as it was, her future as it would be.
Strange thoughts came to her on an evening when she stood by the door of
the kitchen at Drift, waiting for the cart to return from market. It was a
cool, gray gloaming, wreathed in diaphanous mists born of past ram. These
rendered every outline of tree and building vague and immense.
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