same deliberate abstraction as though she were obeying somebody's
orders. She never nourished revenge or resentment, and it seemed to be
her sense of humour (rather than any fierce or hostile feeling) that was
tickled when she hurt any one.

She was a child, apparently without imagination, but displayed, at a
very early period, a strangely sharpened perception of what her nurse
called "the uncanny." She frightened even her mother by the expression
that her face often wore of attention to something or somebody outside
her companion's perception.

"A broomstick is what she'll be flying away on one of these nights, you
mark my word," a nurse declared. "Little devil, she is, neither more nor
less. It isn't decent the way she sits on the floor looking right
through the wall into the next room, as you might say. Yes, and knows
who's coming up the stairs long before she's seen 'em. No place for a
decent Christian woman, and so I told her mother this very morning." It
was, of course, quite impossible to find a nurse to stay with Sarah,
and, when she arrived at the age of seven, nurses were dismissed, and
she either looked after herself or was tended by an abandoned French
maid of her mother's, who stayed with Lady Charlotte, like a wicked,
familiar spirit, for a great number of years on a strange basis of
confidante, fellow-plunderer, and sympathetic adventurer. This French
maid, whose name was, appropriately enough, Hortense, had a real
affection for Sarah "because she was the weeckedest child of 'er age
she ever see." There was nothing of which Sarah, from the very earliest
age, did not seem aware. Her mother's gentlemen friends she valued
according to their status in the house, and, as they "fell off" or "came
on," so was her manner indifferent or pleasant. For Hortense, she had a
real respect, but even that improper and brazen spirit quailed at times