The chapel bell was still ringing as she went swiftly about her few preparations, but it had ceased by the time the small bundle was made up, and Madelon, in her hat and cloak, stood ready to depart.  She had laid all her plans in her own mind, and knew exactly what she meant to do.  She had decided that she would walk to Chaudfontaine; she knew that she had only to follow the highroad to get there, and the distance she thought could not be very great, for she remembered having once walked it with her father years ago.  To be sure she had been very tired, but she had been only a little girl then, and could do much better now; and it appeared to her this would be simpler and better than going into Liege to find the railway-station, of whose situation she had no very distinct idea, and where she might have to wait all night for a train, thus doubling her chances of detection.  She would rather walk the five or six miles to Chaudfontaine during the night, and take the first morning train to Pepinster and Spa; once there, there could of course be no further difficulties.

She stood at the window now, ready to take the first step.  She had on the old black silk gown, in which Soeur Lucie’s skilful fingers had already made the necessary alterations, a black cloth cloak, and a little round hat and veil.  She had grown a good deal during her illness, and the idea of height was aided by the straight black skirt, which, reaching to her ankles, gave her a quaint, old-fashioned air.  She had her bundle on her arm, but there was still a moment of irresolution, as she looked for the last time round the little whitewashed room.  It appeared to her that she was going to do something so dreadfully naughty.  Our Madelon had not lived so long in a convent atmosphere, without imbibing some of the convent ideas and opinions, and she was aware that in the eyes of the nuns there were few offences so heinous as that which she was going to commit.  “But I am not a nun yet,” thinks the poor child, clasping and unclasping her hands in her perplexity, and struggling with the conscience-stricken sense of naughtiness, which threatened at this last moment to overpower all her foregone conclusions, and disconcert her in spite of herself—­ “I am not a nun yet, so it cannot be so very wrong in me; and then there is Monsieur Horace——­” and with the thought of him all Madelon’s courage returned.  The rush of associations linking his name with a hundred aspirations, hopes, plans, which had become a habit of mind with her, revived in full force, and with these came a sudden realization of the imminent nature of the present opportunity, which, if lost, might never return.