cter. "Remember," she wrote on her
slate, when a new servant was curious to know why she always slept with
a light in her room--"Remember that I am deaf _and blind too_ in the
darkness. You, who can hear, have a sense to serve you instead of sight,
in the dark--your ears are of use to you then, as your eyes are in the
light. _I_ hear nothing, and see nothing--I lose all my senses together
in the dark."

It was only by rare accidents, which there was no providing against,
that she was ever terrified in this way, after her peculiarity had first
disclosed itself. In small things as well as in great, Valentine
never forgot that her happiness was his own especial care. He was more
nervously watchful over her than anyone else in the house--for she cost
him those secret anxieties which make the objects of our love doubly
precious to us. In all the years that she had lived under his roof,
he had never conquered his morbid dread that Madonna might be one day
traced and discovered by her father, or by relatives, who might have
a legal claim to her. Under this apprehension he had written to Doctor
Joyce and Mrs. Peckover a day or two after the child's first entry under
his roof, pledging both the persons whom he addressed to the strictest
secrecy in all that related to Madonna and to the circumstances which
had made her his adopted child. As for the hair bracelet, if his
conscience had allowed him, he would have destroyed it immediately; but
feeling that this would be an inexcusable breach of trust, he was fain
to be content with locking it up, as well as the pocket-handkerchief,
in an old bureau in his painting-room, the key of which he always kept
attached to his own watch chain.

Not one of his London friends ever knew how he first met with Madonna.
He boldly baffled all forms of inquiry by requesting that they would
consider her history before she came into his house as a perfect blank,
and by simply presenting her to them as his adopted child. This method
of silencing troublesome curiosity succeeded certainly to admiration;
but at the expense of Mr. Blyth's own moral character. Persons who knew
little or nothing of his real disposition and his early life, all shook
their heads, and laughed in secret; asserting that the mystery was plain
enough to the most ordinary capacity, and that the young lady could be
nothing more nor less than a natural child of his own.

Mrs. Blyth was far more indignant at this report than her husba