The Children's Pilgrimage by L.T. Meade

I have said, for the first two months of Cecile's life in the country she was a happy and light-hearted child. Her purse of money was safe for the present. Her promise lay in abeyance. Even her dead step-mother, anxious as she was to have Lovedy found, had counseled Cecile to delay her search until she was older. Cecile, therefore, might be happy. She might be indeed what she was -- a child of ten. This happiness was not to last. Clouds were to darken the life of this little one; but before the clouds and darkness came, she was to possess a more solid happiness -- a happiness that, once it found entrance into such a heart as hers, could never go away again.

The first beginning of this happiness was to come to Cecile through an unexpected source -- even through the ministrations of an old, partly blind, and half-simple woman.