ABSTRACT
Viola Sedley, the youngest and the only girl among a family of boys, was a pale, dark-haired little creature, with large grey eyes and delicately cut features. People said that she exactly resembled her mother, but the resemblance was only superficial. Mrs. Sedley’s hair was smooth and shining, while Viola’s fell about her massively, for it was heavy and thick. Mrs. Sedley’s eyes were brown and quiet; Viola’s had the grey, shifting tint, that marks the nervous temperament, and the yearning look of a sensitive, bewildered soul. Her father saw only the likeness between mother and daughter, and he called the child, in impatient displeasure, ‘a little Puritan.’ He would have preferred to see her a robust, coarse-fibred creature of his own kind; a girl who would have no reserve or sensitiveness or subtleties of feeling. Mrs. Sedley, with her still, dutiful ways and religious principles, had irritated him from the first day of her meek reign at the Manor-House, and he was highly displeased to find that Viola promised to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
