Valentine Blyth, a warm-hearted painter of large and unsaleable pictures, and his invalid wife have adopted a deaf and mute girl they call Madonna, whose origins are a mystery. When the restless young Zack Thorpe, escaping a strict evangelical home, falls in with a weather-beaten wanderer named Mat back from the Americas, the search for the truth about Madonna’s mother begins.
Collins’s third novel, lost in the Crimean War rush, and a fine early sign of the plotting of The Woman in White. Download the free EPUB.