It had gradually taken form after Michael's imprisonment.

At first it had been only an uneasy ghost that could be laid, a spectre across her path that could be avoided; but since she had come home it had slowly attained gigantic and terrifying proportions.

It loomed before her now as a vague but insistent menace, from which she could no longer turn away.
A great change was coming over Fay, but she tacitly resisted it.

She did not understand it, nor realise that the menace came from within her gates, was of the nature of an insurrection in the citadel of self.

We do not always recognise the voice of the rebel soul when first it begins to speak hoarsely, unintelligibly, urgently from the dark cell to which we have relegated it.
Some of us are so constituted that we can look back at our past and see it as a gradation of steps, a sort of sequence, and can thus gain a kind of inkling of the nature of the next step against which we are even now striking our feet.
But poor Fay saw her life only as shattered, meaningless fragments, confused, mutilated masses without coherence.