There were the same stupid meals, the same wearisome long evenings, the stifling ugliness of house and grounds, the Shadow settling in so thickly that it seemed almost a visible, tangible thing.  I came to feel the only friendly things in all this hostile, cruel place were the robins that hopped boldly over the monstrous terraces and even up to the windows of the unsightly house itself.  The robins alone knew joy; they danced, believing no evil thing was possible in all God’s radiant world.  They believed in everybody; their god’s plan of life had no room in it for hell, damnation, and lakes of brimstone.  I came to love the little birds.  Had Samuel Franklyn known them, he might have preached a different sermon, bequeathing love in place of terror!

Most of my time I spent writing; but it was a pretence at best, and rather a dangerous one besides.  For it stirred the mind to production, with the result that other things came pouring in as well.  With reading it was the same.  In the end I found an aggressive, deliberate resistance to be the only way of feasible defense.  To walk far afield was out of the question, for it meant leaving my sister too long alone, so that my exercise was confined to nearer home.  My saunters in the grounds, however, never surprised the goblin garden again.  It was close at hand, but I seemed unable to get wholly into it.  Too many things assailed my mind for any one to hold exclusive possession, perhaps.

Indeed, all the interpretations, all the “layers,” to use my sister’s phrase, slipped in by turns and lodged there for a time.  They came day and night, and though my reason denied them entrance they held their own as by a kind of squatter’s right.  They stirred moods already in me, that is, and did not introduce entirely new ones; for every mind conceals ancestral deposits that have been cultivated in turn along the whole line of its descent.  Any day a chance shower may cause this one or that to blossom.  Thus it came to me, at any rate.  After darkness the Inquisition paced the empty corridors and set up ghastly apparatus in the dismal halls; and once, in the library, there swept over me that easy and delicious conviction that by confessing my wickedness I could resume it later, since Confession is expression, and expression brings relief and leaves one ready to accumulate again.  And in such mood I felt bitter and unforgiving towards all others who thought differently.  Another time it was a Pagan thing that assaulted me—­so trivial yet oh, so significant at the time—­when I dreamed that a herd of centaurs rolled up with a great stamping of hoofs round the house to destroy it, and then woke to hear the horses tramping across the field below the lawns; they neighed ominously and their noisy panting was audible as if it were just outside my windows.

But the tree episode, I think, was the most curious of all—­except, perhaps, the incident with the children which I shall mention in a moment—­for its closeness to reality was so unforgettable.