Olive Author:Dinah Maria Mulock Craik Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. It was many days before Mrs. Rothesay recovered from the shock occasioned by the tidings—to her almost more fearful than her child's death—that it... more » was doomed for life to suffer the curse of hopeless deformity. For a curse, a bitter curse, this seemed to the young and beautiful creature, who had learned since her birth to consider beauty as the greatest good. She was, so to speak, in love with loveliness; not merely in herself, but in every human creature. This feeling sprung more from enthusiasm than from personal vanity, the borders of which meanness she had just touched, but never crossed. Perhaps, also, she was too conscious of her own loveliness, and admired herself too ardently to care for attracting the petty admiration of others. She took it quite as a matter of course; and was no more surprised at being worshipped than if she had been the Goddess of Beauty herself. But if Sybilla Rothesay gloried in her own perfections, she had no less gloried in those of all she loved, and chiefly in her noble-looking husband. And they were so young, so quickly wed and so soon parted, that this emotion had no time to deepen into that soul-united affection which is independent of outward things; or, rather, becomes so divine, that instead of beauty creating love, love has power to create beauty. No marvel, then, that not having attained to a higher experience, Sybilla considered beauty as all in all. And this child—her child and Angus's—would be a deformity on the face of the earth, a shame to its parents, a dishonor to its race. How should she ever bear to look upon it ? Still more, how should she ever dare to show the poor cripple to its father, and say, " This is our child—our firstborn." Would he not turn away in disgust, and answer that it had better died ? Suc...« less