Watching the moonlight glittering on her jewel
she was hypnotized to sleep, rocked by the soft motion of the little
boat. The current of the stream took her out to sea, the turn of the
tide washed her back again, and she wakened at dawn famished with
hunger, drenched with the icy water the little boat had shipped. She was
too good a swimmer to drown and, after a valiant struggle, she came to
land two miles from home.
Her romance was never killed by misadventures. The very next day she
climbed Ben Grief and lighted a ring of fire round his wrinkled brow by
carrying up loads of dried heather and grass through which she fought
her way to the rescue of a dream Brunnhilde, sleeping within the fire.
She reached home that night with scorched clothes and hair, and
smoke-smarting eyes. But such mishaps were only part of the adventure,
as inevitable as storms in winter and wounds in battle. These dreams
were in the days before her father's Rationalism kept her chained
indoors: his evangelism sowed seeds that took root and flowered into a
desire that she might be a wild-eyed, flame-tongued John the Baptist,
making straight the way of the Lord. When this dream came to her it
transmuted all the other dreams; from so deep down inside her that it
seemed a voice of someone autocratic standing beside her came the
conviction that to be a John the Baptist meant to be a martyr and an
anchorite.
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