“You are better,” she said at last, setting down the candle on the table behind her, and smoothing the pillow and coverlet.  Her voice was like her face, harsh and melancholy, but with a tender, pathetic ring in it at times.

“Am I?” said Madelon.  “Have I been ill again?  Where is Soeur Lucie?  This is not the convent—­where am I?”

“You are not at the convent now,” answered Jeanne-Marie.  “I am taking care of you, and you must lie very still, and go to sleep again when you have taken this.”

Madelon drank off her medicine, but she was not satisfied, and in a moment her brain was at work again.

“I can’t make out where I am,” she said, looking up at Jeanne-Marie with the old wistful look in her eyes—­“is it in an hotel? —­is papa coming?  I thought I was at the convent with Aunt Therese.  Ah! do help me!”

“I will tell you nothing unless you lie still,” said Jeanne-Marie, as Madelon made a most futile attempt to raise herself in bed.  She considered a moment, and then said—­“Don’t you remember, ma petite? Your papa is dead, and you are not at the convent any more, and need not go back there unless you like.  You are with me, Jeanne-Marie, at Le Trooz, and I will take care of you till you are well.  Now you are not to talk any more.”

Madelon lay silent for a minute.  “Yes, I remember,” she said at last, slowly.  “Papa is dead, and Monsieur Horace—­he is not here?” she cried, with startling eagerness.

“No, no,” said Jeanne-Marie, “no one is here but me.”

“Because you know,” Madelon went on, “I cannot see him yet—­I cannot—­it would not do to see him, you know, till—­till—­ah! you do not know about that——­” She stopped suddenly, and Jeanne-Marie smoothed the pillow again with her rough, kindly hands.

“I know that you must go to sleep now, and that I shall not say a word more to you to-night,” she said; and then, without heeding Madelon’s further questions, she put out the light, and sat silently by the bedside till the child was once more asleep.

Madelon did not recover readily from this second attack.  Even when she was pronounced wholly out of danger, there were the weariest days to be passed, relapses, weakness, languor.  Flowers bloomed and faded in the garden below, the scent of the roses perfumed the air, the red-tipped vine-shoots growing upwards narrowed the space of blue sky seen through the little window, till the sun shone in softened by a screen of glowing green leaves; and all through these lengthening summer days our pale little Madelon lay on her sick bed, very still, and patient, and uncomplaining, and so gentle and grateful to Jeanne-Marie, who nursed and watched her unceasingly with her harsh tenderness, that a passionate affection seized the hard, lonely woman, for the forlorn little stranger who was so dependent upon her, and who owed everything to her compassion and care.

It was not long before a recollection of the past came back to Madelon, sufficiently clear, until the moment of her jumping out of the train at Le Trooz; after that she could remember nothing distinctly, only a general sense of misery, and pain, and terror.  She asked Jeanne-Marie numberless questions, as to how and where she had found her, and what she had said.