to be let off the tragical ending, which she could not bear, at last always stopping her ears when the critical moment of the sword, or the wheel, or the fire approached.  She took great interest in the history of Ste. Therese, especially in the account of her running away in her childhood, which seemed to her most worthy of imitation—­ only, thinks Madelon, she would have taken care not to have been caught, and brought back again.  The subsequent history of the saint she found less edifying; nothing that savoured of conventual life found favour in Madelon’s eyes in these days; and indeed her whole faith in saints and legends was rudely shaken one day by a broad and somewhat reckless assertion on the part of Soeur Lucie, that all the female saints had been nuns—­an assertion certainly unsupported by the facts, whether legendary or ascertained, but which had somehow become a fixed idea in Soeur Lucie’s mind, and was dear to the heart of the little nun.

“They were not nuns like you, then,” says Madelon at last, after some combating of the point, “for they could go out, and walk about, and do a great many things you must not do—­and if I were a saint, I would never, never become a nun!”

“But it is the nuns that have become saints,” cries Soeur Lucie, with the happiest conviction; and Madelon, unable to argue out her own ideas on the subject, contented herself with repeating, that anyhow they had not all been nuns like Soeur Lucie, which was indisputable.

These were, as we have said, Madelon’s happiest times, and, indeed, they hardly repaid the child for long days of weariness and despondency, for hours of heart-sick longing for she knew not what, of objectless hoping, of that saddest form of home-sickness, that knows of no home for which to pine.  In all the future there was but one point on which her mind could rest—­Monsieur Horace’s promised return, and that was too vague, too remote to afford her much comfort.  And her own promise to him, has she forgotten that?  She would not have been the Madelon that we know if she had done so, but we need hardly say that she had not been two days in the convent, before she instinctively perceived how futile were all those poor little schemes with which she had been so busy the evening before she parted with Graham, how impossible it would be to ask or obtain her aunt’s permission for going to Spa on such an errand.  The convent was to all intents and purposes a prison to our little Madelon, and she could only wait and cherish her purpose till a happier moment.

She heard twice from Graham in the first few months.  He wrote just before leaving England, and once from the Crimae; but this last letter elicited an icy response from the Superior, to the effect generally that her niece being now under her care, and receiving the education that would fit her for the life that would be hers for the future, she wished all old connections and associations to be broken off; in short, that