Sometimes I used to hide the book, and try to forget where I'd hidden it.

But I never could forget, and in the end I always went and found it, and peeped at the picture and nearly died of terror.

The mere outside of the book had a horrible fascination for me.
I used to look at it all the time I was in the drawing-room, and then pretend I wasn't looking at it; yet if the housemaid had moved it an inch in dusting the table where it lay, I always knew." "Poor little silly child! If only you'd have told me, I'd have asked Miss Farringdon to put it away where you couldn't get at it." "But I couldn't have told you, Chris--I couldn't have told anybody.
There seemed to be some terrible bond between that dreadful book and me which I was bound to keep secret.

Of course it doesn't frighten me any longer, though I shall always hate it; but the newspapers frighten me just in the same way when there are horrible things in them." "Why, Betty, I am ashamed of you! And such a clever girl as you, too, to be taken in by the romancing of penny-a-liners! They always make the worst of things in newspapers in order to sell them." "Oh! then you think things aren't as bad as newspapers say ?" "Nothing like; but they must write something for people to read, and the more sensational it is the better people like it." Elisabeth was comforted; and she never knew that Christopher did not leave the house that day without asking Miss Farringdon if, for a few weeks, the daily paper might be delivered at the works and sent up to the Willows afterward, as he wanted to see the trade-reports the first thing in the morning.

This was done; and sometimes Christopher remembered to send the papers on to the house, and sometimes he did not.
On these latter occasions Miss Farringdon severely reproved him, and told him that he would never be as capable a man as his uncle had been, if he did not endeavour to cultivate his memory; whereat Chris was inwardly tickled, but was outwardly very penitent and apologetic, promising to try to be less forgetful in future.