Angela sat on a cushion at her uncle's feet, and her deep
violet eyes were full of an eager, almost feverish interest which
she could scarcely conceal; and the Abbe Vergniaud, vitally and
painfully concerned as he was in the narrative about to be told,
could not help looking at her, and wondering at the extraordinary
light and beauty of her face thus transfigured by an excitation of
thought. Was she a secret follower of his son's theories, he
wondered? Composing himself in his chair, he sat with bent head,
marvelling as he heard the story of the bold and fearless and
philosophic life that had sprung into the world all out of his
summer's romance with a little innocent girl, whom he had found
praying to her guardian angel.
"It is not always ourselves," began Cyrillon in his slow, emphatic,
yet musical voice, "who are responsible for the good or the evil we
may do in our lives. Much of our character is formed by the earliest
impressions of childhood--and my earliest impressions were those of
sorrow. I started life with the pulse of my mother's broken heart
beating in me,--hence my thoughts were sombre, and of an altogether
unnatural character to a child of tender years. We lived--my mother
and I--in a small cottage on the edge of a meadow outside the quaint
old city of Tours--a meadow, full at all seasons, of the loveliest
wild flowers, but sweetest in the springtime when the narcissi
bloomed, lifting their thousand cups of sweet perfume like incense
to the sky.
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