[Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins]@TWC D-Link book
Hide and Seek

CHAPTER VII
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The child, however, had such a horror of this resource being tried, when it was communicated to her, that Mr.Blyth instinctively followed Mrs.
Peckover's example, and consulted the little creature's feelings, by allowing her in this particular--and indeed in most others--to remain perfectly happy and contented in her own way.
The first influence which reconciled her almost immediately to her new life, was the influence of Mrs.Blyth.The perfect gentleness and patience with which the painter's wife bore her incurable malady, seemed to impress the child in a very remarkable manner from the first.

The sight of that frail, wasted life, which they told her, by writing, had been shut up so long in the same room, and had been condemned to the same weary inaction for so many years past, struck at once to Mary's heart and filled her with one of those new and mysterious sensations which mark epochs in the growth of a child's moral nature.

Nor did these first impressions ever alter.

When years had passed away, and when Mary, being "little" Mary no longer, possessed those marked characteristics of feature and expression which gained for her the name of "Madonna," she still preserved all her child's feeling for the painter's wife.

However playful her manner might often be with Valentine, it invariably changed when she was in Mrs.Blyth's presence; always displaying, at such times, the same anxious tenderness, the same artless admiration, and the same watchful and loving sympathy.


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