Tales of shapes romance #12

She had thought about it sometimes, for she had been a solitary child, and she loved a mystery. She had turned it over in her mind and constructed a dozen different reasons for her father's unaccountable anger, each other longer and more complicated than the last.

Then with the possibilities finally exhausted, she smiled a little remembering in faded snatches the fantasies she had constructed. In her favourite one old man who had tried to snatch an infant from her parents arm so he could turn her over to a rayol family who wanted to make her a princess.

She had loved that fantasy; she had been deliciously torn between loyalty to her parents and the wistful longing to be someone important.