A certain fancied resemblance in it to her own mother likewise drew her heart to the boy. Then Robert took from his pocket the gold thimble, and said, 'This thimmel was my mamma's. Well, I will use it sometimes for your sake. Meantime the love he bore his teacher, and the influence of her beauty, began to mould him, in his kind and degree, after her likeness, so that he grew nice in his person and dress, and smoothed the roughness and moderated the broadness of his speech with the amenities of the English which she made so sweet upon her tongue. Nor did the piano absorb all his faculties.
Every divine influence tends to the rounded perfection of the whole.
His love of Nature grew more rapidly. Miss St. John began to find that he put expressions of his own into the simple things she gave him to play, and even dreamed a little at his own will when alone with the passive instrument. Little did Mrs. Falconer think into what a seventh heaven of accursed music she had driven her boy. But not yet did he tell his friend, much as he loved and much as he trusted her, the little he knew of his mother's sorrows and his father's sins, or whose the hand that had struck him when she found him lying in the waste factory. For a time almost all his trouble about God went from him.