About a fortnight after this, Mary Quince, a very veracious spinster,
reported to me, that having got up to fix the window, which was rattling,
at about four o'clock in the morning, she saw a light shining from the
library window. She could swear to its being a strong light, streaming
through the chinks of the shutter, and moving. No doubt the link was waved
about his head by the angry 'link-man.'
These strange occurrences helped, I think, just then to make me nervous,
and prepared the way for the odd sort of ascendency which, through my
sense of the mysterious and super-natural, that repulsive Frenchwoman was
gradually, and it seemed without effort, establishing over me.
Some dark points of her character speedily emerged from the prismatic mist
with which she had enveloped it.
Mrs. Rusk's observation about the agreeability of new-comers I found to be
true; for as Madame began to lose that character, her good-humour abated
very perceptibly, and she began to show gleams of another sort of temper,
that was lurid and dangerous.
Notwithstanding this, she was in the habit of always having her Bible open
by her, and was austerely attentive at morning and evening services, and
asked my father, with great humility, to lend her some translations of
Swedenborg's books, which she laid much to heart.
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