Her husband had come of an ancient Jersey family, who were in Normandy before the Conqueror was born; a man of genius almost in his craft, but scarcely a gentleman according to the standard of her father, the distinguished exile and now retired watchmaker.

If Guida should chance to be as fortunate as herself, she could ask no more.
She had watched the child anxiously, for the impulses of Guida's temperament now and then broke forth in indignation as wild as her tears and in tears as wild as her laughter.

As the girl grew in health and stature, she tried, tenderly, strenuously, to discipline the sensitive nature, bursting her heart with grief at times because she knew that these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous.
Four things were always apparent in the girl's character: sympathy with suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense candour.
Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an asylum in the garden behind the cottage.

Not a dog hungry for a bone, stopping at Guida's door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in the hawthorn hedge of the garden.

Every morning you might have seen the birds in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the lilac-bushes, waiting for the tiny snow-storm of bread to fall from her hand.