Two days afterwards, Jeanne-Marie produced two strips of cloth, such as are used for purposes of church decoration, with patterns and materials for embroidery.

“Is that the sort of thing?” she said.  “If you could do these, you would get thirty francs for them, I daresay; I will see that they are disposed of.”

“I will try,” said Madelon.  “Jeanne-Marie, how good you are to me!—­whatever I want, you do for me!”

“That is nothing,” said the woman, and went abruptly away to attend to her customers.

So, all the long summer days, Madelon sat through hot noontides in the shady garden below, through golden sunsets at the open window of her room above, stitching with silks and gold and silver thread, till her weak little fingers ached, and the task seemed as if it would never be done.  Down in the homely neglected little garden, all a sweet tangle of flowers and weeds, she would seat herself; the birds would twitter overhead, the bees would come humming round her amongst the unpruned vines and roses that clambered everywhere, while the embroidery pattern slowly grew beneath her fingers.  She worked steadily and well, but she could not work very fast; and she wearied, oh! how she wearied of it sometimes; but she never wavered in her purpose.  “It is for Monsieur Horace,” she would say, and begin again with fresh zeal.  Through the open window of the little kitchen, which looked upon the garden, she could see Jeanne-Marie coming and going, chopping herbs, shelling peas and beans; and sometimes, when Madelon was too tired of her work, she would gladly throw it down, that she might help in these employments.  “May I make an omelette, Jeanne-Marie?” she would say; “I know how to do it, if you will let me try.”  And the sight of Madelon flitting about the kitchen, busy among the pots and pans, seemed to stir some long-forgotten emotion in Jeanne-Marie’s sad heart—­too long-forgotten to be learnt anew without pain, for her eyes would fill with tears as she watched her.  The child never went into the village, or, indeed, stirred beyond the garden; that was all the world to her just now, peopled by Jeanne-Marie, her hopes, and her embroidery.

Is it most strange or most natural, one wonders, that there are times when one small nook of earth shuts out, as it were, the whole universe from our eyes, when one personal interest occupies us to the exclusion of the whole world of action, and progress, and speculation, and thought?  Thrones may topple over, nationalities be effaced, revolutions in politics, in religion, in science be effected, and all pass unheeded while we sit counting our own private loss and gain in love or friendship, in grief or joy.  Whilst Madelon has been wearying out her little heart and brain in the pursuit of her self-imposed task, the world has not been, and is not, standing still, we may be sure, and her small wheel of life is somehow kept in motion by the great revolving circle of events, however little