He cherished them with the idolatry which all great workers entertain for their children, which is one of the most dangerous forms of paternal tenderness; Lydia's incipient vices were to the planter delightful fancies! Did she lie?
The excellent man exclaimed: What an imagination she has! Was she jealous?
He would sigh, pressing to his broad breast the tiny form: How sensitive she is!...

The result of that selfish blindness--for to love children thus is to love them for one's self and not for them--was that the girl, at the time of her entrance at Roehampton, was spoiled in the essential traits of her character.

But she was so pretty, she owed to the singular mixture of three races an originality of grace so seductive that only the keen glance of a governess of genius could have discerned, beneath that exquisite exterior, the already marked lines of her character.

Such governesses are rare, still more so at convents than elsewhere.

There was none at Roehampton when Lydia entered that pious haven which was to prove fatal to her, for a reason precisely contrary to that which transformed for Florent the lawns of peaceful Beaumont into a radiant paradise of friendship.
Among the pupils with whom Lydia was to be educated were four young girls from Philadelphia, older than the newcomer by two years, and who, also, had left America for the first time.