Read it through once

It was to Lyme Regis they went—this unduly optimistic, noisy, sportsman-practitioner, with his uncomplaining still trustful wife and their six-year-old daughter, wide-eyed and wondering why this sudden flight. The true import of this removal was not to be hidden from this remarkably intuitive child. “In that old, historical town,” she writes in one of her reminiscent moods, “that old town so finely placed on the very line where Dorsetshire and Devonshire meet, I spent the eventful year when the careless happiness of childhood vanished, and the troubles of the world first dimly dawned upon my heart—felt in its effects rather than known—felt in its chilling gloom, as we feel the shadow of a cloud that passes over the sun on an April day.” Strangely-sad words these, expressing the thoughts of a child at an age when, not strong enough to help and too young to be confided in, it can do nothing but mark the change, questioning the mother’s furtive tear while, rendered more sensitive by reason of its own impotence, it shudders in the cold atmosphere of vague yet ill-concealed suspicion and mistrust.