I must know all now." Lucia rose, and bringing a footstool, sat down in her old childish attitude at her mother's feet; only that her face, which was worn and pale, was quite hidden.
"I am ready," she said.

"Explain all I cannot understand." No human being, perhaps, could tell his or her own story with perfect truth; still less could tell it so to the hearer the most passionately loved, and whose love seems to hang in the balance.

It would be apt to be a piece of special pleading, for or against, as egotism or conscience happened to be strongest.

Best, then, not to try to reproduce the words spoken that night--spoken in the tuneless, level voice, which, in its dull monotony, is a truer indication of pain than any other; but to repeat only the substance of all that Lucia then heard for the first time.
To her, the old house by the Dee was already familiar ground; she knew, dimly, the figure of a lady who died there in her youth, and left a desolate child, well cared for, but little loved, to grow up alone; and she knew, more familiarly, but with a sense of awe which was almost dislike, the child's father, her own grandfather, a man saddened, silent, unsympathetic.

These, and various relations and servants who had surrounded her mother in her childhood, she had already heard of a thousand times.