“Oh! because the room here is so small and crowded.  At Wiesbaden there are rooms large—­so large—­quite like this courtyard,” extending her small arms by way of giving expression to her vague sense of grandeur; “and looking-glasses all round, and crimson sofas, and gold chandeliers, and ladies in such beautiful dresses, and officers who danced with me.  I don’t know any one here.”

“And who were the Count and the Prince you were talking about to Mademoiselle Sophie in the garden this morning?”

Madelon looked disconcerted.

“I shan’t tell you,” she said, hanging down her head.

“Will you not?  Not if I want to know very much?”

She hesitated a moment, then burst forth—­

“Well, then, they were just nobody at all.  I was only talking make-believe to Sophie, that she might do the steps properly.”

“Oh! then, you did not expect to see them here this evening?”

“Here!” cries Madelon, with much contempt; “why, no.  One meets nothing but bourgeois here.”

Graham was infinitely amused.

“Am I a bourgeois?” he said, laughing.

“I don’t know,” she replied, looking at him; “but you are not a milord, I know, for I heard papa asking Mademoiselle Cecile about you, and she said you were not a milord at all.”

“So you care for nothing but Counts and Princes?”

“I don’t know,” she said again.  Then with an evident sense that such abstract propositions would involve her beyond her depth, she added, “Have you any other pretty things to show me?  I should like to see what else you have on your chain.”

In five minutes more they were fast friends, and Madelon, seated on Graham’s knee, was chattering away, and recounting to him all the history of her short life.  He was not long in perceiving that her father was the beginning and end of all her ideas—­her one standard of perfection, the one medium through which, small as she was, she was learning to look out on and estimate the world, and receiving her first impressions of life.  She had no mother, she said, in answer to Graham’s inquiries. Maman had died when she was quite a little baby; and though she seemed to have some dim faint recollection of having once lived in a cottage in the country, with a woman to take care of her, everything else referred to her father, from her first, vague floating memories to the time when she could date them as distinct and well-defined, facts.  She had once had a nurse, she said, —­a long time ago that was, when she was little—­but papa did not like her, and so she went away; and now she was too big for one.  Papa did everything for her, it appeared, from putting her to sleep at night, when Mademoiselle was disposed to be wakeful, to nursing her when she was ill, taking her to fetes on grand holidays, buying her pretty things, walking with her, teaching her dancing, and singing, and reading; and she loved him so much—­ah! so much!  Indeed, in all the world, the child had but one object for a child’s boundless powers of trust and love and veneration, and that one was her father.