e before"----

The door opened and Elspie led in a little girl. By her stature she
might have been two years old, but her face was like that of a child of
ten or twelve--so thoughtful, so grave. Her limbs were small and wasted,
but exquisitely delicate. The same might be said of her features; which,
though thin, and wearing a look of premature age, together with that
quiet, earnest, melancholy cast peculiar to deformity, were yet regular,
almost pretty. Her head was well-shaped, and from it fell a quantity
of amber-coloured hair--pale "lint-white locks," which, with the almost
colourless transparency of her complexion, gave a spectral air to her
whole appearance. She looked less like a child than a woman dwarfed into
childhood; the sort of being renowned in elfin legends, as springing
up on a lonely moor, or appearing by a cradle-side; supernatural, yet
fraught with a nameless beauty. She was dressed with the utmost care,
in white, with blue ribands; and her lovely hair was arranged so as to
hide, as much as possible, the defect, which, alas! was even then only
too perceptible. It was not a hump-back, nor yet a twisted spine; it
was an elevation of the shoulders, shortening the neck, and giving the
appearance of a perpetual stoop. There was nothing disgusting or
painful in it, but still it was an imperfection, causing an instinctive
compassion--an involuntary "Poor little creature, what a pity!"

Such was the child--the last daughter of the ever-beautiful Rothesay
line--which Elspie led to claim the paternal embrace. Olive looked up
at her father with her wistful, pensive eyes, in which was no childish
shyness--only wonder. He met them with a gaze of frenzied unbelief. Then
his fingers clutched his wife's arm with the grasp of an iron vice.

"Tell me! Is that--that miserable creature--our daughter, Olive
Rothesay?"

She answered, "Yes." He shook her off angrily, looked once more at the
child, and then turned away, putting his hand before his eyes, as if to
shut out the sight.

Olive saw the gesture. Young as she was, it went deep to her child's
soul. Elspie saw it too, and without bestowing a second glance on her
master or his wife, she snatched up the child and hurried from the room.

The father and mother were left alone--to meet that crisis most fatal to
wedded happiness, the discovery of the first deceit Captain Rothesay
sat silent, with averted face; Sybilla was weeping--not that repentant
shower which rains