unexpected lurch, and slipped, face downward, into the glowing
embers. It was a full minute before the horror-stricken boy could
extricate the little creature from the cruel flame that had already
done its fatal work. The baby escaped with her life, but was
disfigured for ever. As she grew older, the gentle hand of time
could not entirely efface the terrible scars. One cheek was wrinkled
and crimson, while one eye and the mouth were drawn down
pathetically. The accident might have changed the disposition of any
child, but Lyddy chanced to be a sensitive, introspective bit of
feminine humanity, in whose memory the burning flame was never
quenched. Her mother, partly to conceal her own wounded vanity, and
partly to shield the timid, morbid child, kept her out of sight as
much as possible; so that at sixteen, when she was left an orphan,
she had lived almost entirely in solitude.

She became, in course of time, a kind of general nursery governess in
a large family of motherless children. The father was almost always
away from home; his sister kept the house, and Lyddy stayed in the
nursery, bathing the babies and putting them to bed, dressing them in
the morning, and playing with them in the safe privacy of the garden
or the open attic.

They loved her, disfigured as she was--for the child despises mere
externals, and explores the heart of things to see whether it be good
or evil--but they could never induce her to see strangers, nor to
join any gathering of people.

The children were grown and married now, and Lyddy was nearly forty
when she came into possession of house and lands and fortune; forty,
with twenty years of unexpended feeling pent within her. Forty--that