When Madelon went to her room that night, she sat long over her fire, pondering, girl-fashion, on her talk with Horace Graham.  The tones of his voice were still ringing in her ears; she seemed still to see his kind look, to feel the friendly grasp of his hand; and as she thought of him, her familiar little bed-room, with its white curtained bed, and pictured walls, and well-filled bookshelves, seemed to vanish, and she saw herself again, a desolate child, sitting at the window of the Paris hotel that hot August night her father died, weeping behind the convent grating, crouched on the damp earth in the dark avenues of the Promenade a Sept Heures.  He had not changed in all these years, she thought; he had come back kind and good as ever, to be her friend and protector, as he had always been; and he had said she was not altered much either, and yet she was—­ah! so altered from the unconscious, unthinking, ignorant child he had left.  She began to pace up and down the room, where indeed she had spent many a wakeful night before now, thinking, reflecting, reasoning, trying to make out the clue to her old life—­striving to reconcile it with the new life around her—­not too successfully on the whole.  How was it she had first discovered the want of harmony between them?  How was it she had first learnt to appreciate the gulf that separated the experiences of her first years, from the pure, peaceful life she was leading now?  She could hardly have told; no one had revealed it to her, no one had spoken of it; but in a thousand unconsidered ways—­in talk, in books, in the unconscious influences of her every-day surroundings, she had come to understand the true meaning of her father’s life, and to know that the memory of these early days, that she had found so bright and happy, was something never to be spoken of, to be hidden away—­a disgrace to her, even, perhaps.  Aunt Barbara never would let her talk of them, would have blotted them out, if possible; she had wondered why at first—­she understood well enough now, and resented the enforced silence.  She only cherished the thought of them, and of her father the more; she only clung to her old love for him the more desperately, because it must be in secret; and she longed at times, with a sad, inexpressible yearning, for something of the old brightness that had died out one mournful night nearly eight years ago, when she had talked with her father for the last time.

“I think I must be a hundred years old,” the girl would say to herself sometimes, after returning from one of those little parties of which she had spoken to Graham, where she had spent the evening in the company of a dozen other young ladies of her own age, all white muslin and sash-ribbons.  “These girls, how tiresome they all are!—­how they chatter and laugh, and what silly jokes they make!  How can it amuse them?  But they are still in the school-room, as Aunt Barbara is always telling me; and before that, they were all in the nursery, I suppose; they do not know anything about life; their only experiences concern nurses and governesses; whilst I—­I—­ah! is it possible I am no older than they are?”