It might be, that Captain Marsett wedded one who was of inferior station,' and his wife had to bear blows from cruel people.
The supposition seemed probable.

The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as the gathering of the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence.

What?
She did not reflect.

Her quick physical sensibility curled to some breath of heated atmosphere brought about her by this new acquaintance: not pleasant, if she had thought of pleasure: intensely suggestive of our life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants.
But she was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.
Besides, she was an exile.

Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness.