Sisily first opened her eyes on a grey day by a grim coast, and life had always been grim and grey to her.  Her memory was a blurred record of wanderings from place to place in pursuit of something which was never to be found.  Her earliest recollection was of a bleak eastern coast, where Robert Turold had spent long years in a losing game of patience with the sea.  He had gone there in the belief that some of his ancestors were buried in a forgotten churchyard on the cliffs, and he spent his time attempting to decipher inscriptions which had been obliterated almost as effectually as the dead whose remains they extolled.

The old churchyard had been called “The Garden of Rest” by some sentimental versifier, but there was no rest for the dead who tried to sleep within its broken walls.  The sea kept undermining the crumbling cliffs upon which it stood, carrying away earth, and tombstones, and bones.  Nor was it a garden.  Nothing grew in the dank air but crawling things which were horrible to the eye.  There were great rank growths of toadstools, yellow, blue, livid white, or spotted like adders, which squirmed and squelched underfoot to send up a sickly odour of decay.  The only green thing was some ivy, a parasitic vampire which drew its lifeblood from the mouldering corpse of an old church.

It was in this desolate place that the girl conceived her first impression of her father as a stern and silent man who burrowed among old graves like a mole.  Robert Turold had fought a stout battle for the secret contained in those forgotten graves on a bleak headland, but the sea had beaten him in the long run, carrying off the stones piecemeal until only one remained, a sturdy pillar of granite which marked the bones of one who, some hundred and fifty years before had been “An English Gentleman and a Christian”—­so much of the epitaph remained.  Robert Turold hoped that it was an ancestor, but he was not destined to know.  One night the stone was carried off with a great splash which was heard far, and left a ragged gap in the cliffside, like a tooth plucked from a giant’s mouth.

When Sisily first saw the cliffs of Cornwall she was reminded of those early days, with the difference that the Cornish granite rocks stood firm, as though saying to the sea, “Here rises England.”

The house Robert Turold had taken looked down on the sea from the summit.  It was a strange place to build a house, on the brink of a broken Cornish cliffline, above the grey surges of the Atlantic, among a wilderness of dark rocks, facing black moors, which rolled away from the cliffs as lonely and desolate as eternity.  The place had been built by a London artist, long since dead, who had lived there and painted seascapes from an upstairs studio which overlooked the sea.

The house had remained empty for years until Robert Turold had taken it six months before.  It was too isolated and lonely to gain a permanent tenant, and it stood in the teeth of Atlantic gales.  The few scattered houses and farms of the moors cringed from the wind in sheltered depressions, but Flint House faced its everlasting fury on the top of the cliffs, a rugged edifice of grey stone, a landmark visible for many miles.