ous pair to guard me
I grew up to be fifteen years old. My outer life consisted of eating,
sleeping, reading--for the wretch taught me to read--playing with my
dogs and birds, and listening to old Margery's stories. But there was
an inward life, fierce and strong, as it was rank and morbid, lived and
brooded over alone, when Margery and her master fancied me sleeping in
idiotic content. How were they to know that the creature they had reared
and made ever had a thought of her own--ever wondered who she was, where
she came from, what she was destined to be, and what lay in the great
world beyond? The crooked little monster made a great mistake in
teaching me to read, he should have known that books sow seed that grow
up and flourish tall and green, till they become giants in strength.
I knew enough to be certain there was a bright and glad world without,
from which they shut me in and debarred me; and I knew enough to hate
them both for it, with a strong and heartfelt hatred, only second to
what I feel now."

She stopped for a moment, and fixed her dark, gloomy eyes on the
swarming floor, and shook off, with out a shudder, the hideous things
that crawled over her rich dress. She had scarcely looked at Sir Norman
since she began to speak, but he had done enough looking for them both,
never once taking his eyes from the handsome darkening face. He thought
how strangely like her story was to Leoline's--both shut in and isolated
from the outer world. Verily, destiny seemed to have woven the woof and
warp of their fates wonderfully together, for their lives were as
much the same as their faces. Miranda, having shook off her crawling
acquaintances, watched them glancing along the foul floor in the
darkness, and went moodily on.

"It was three years ago when I was fifteen years old, as I told you,
that a change took place in my life. Up to that time, that miserable
dwarf was what people would call my guardian, and did not trouble me
much with his heavenly company. He was a great deal from our house,
sometimes absent for weeks together; and I remember I used to envy the
freedom with which he came and went, far more than I ever wondered where
he spent his precious time. I did not know then that he belonged to
the honorable profession of highwaymen, with variations of coining when
travelers were few and money scarce. He was then, and is still, at
the head of a formidable gang, over whom he wields most desperate
authority--as per