The Extraordinary Confessions of Diana Please

The very rudeness of the creature nominated by Fate to be my warden gave me a feeling of confidence. Here was a shepherd's dog ugly enough to frighten away the wolf himself, should he cross us in the shape of my master. I thrilled to have secured his promise, which, for all his boorishness, and perhaps because of it, I had faith in. The dark pit was already half bridged in my foolish young imagination, and I dreamed of alighting on the farther side -- to what? Not, indeed, to the old melancholy life of the cottage near the Steine. For all my sad experience, I never entertained that prospect for one moment. I was but now in my eleventh year, yet some instinct informed me that the dead -- amongst whom, surely, I must be written -- should not return if they would avoid the mortification of home truths; that broken threads cannot be made one again, and leave no scar. Perhaps the spirit of vagabondage even had entered a little into my blood.

In any case, it was the breezy security of my father's, not my mother's, protection to which I hurried in thought, with this reverent cur for escort.