“Run upstairs to my room, petite,” she said; “you will be out of the way there, and I will come to you presently.”

“No,” said Madelon, refusing point-blank, “I am going with papa.”

“But it is not possible, my child; you will only be in the way.  You heard what M. le Docteur said?”

“I will go to papa!” cries Madelon, trembling with agitation and excitement; “he will want me, I know he will, I am never in his way!  You have no right to prevent my going to him, Madame!  Let me pass, I say,” for Madame Lavaux was standing between her and the door of the room into which M. Linders had been carried.

“Allons donc, we must be reasonable,” says Madame.  “Your papa does not want you now, and little girls should do as they are told.  If you had gone to bed an hour ago, as I advised, you would have known nothing about all this till to-morrow.  Eh, these children! there is no doing anything with them; and these men,” she continued, with a sigh, “the noise they make with their great boots! and precisely Madame la Comtesse, au premier, had an attaque des nerfs this evening, and said the house was as noisy as a barrack—­but these things always happen at unfortunate moments!”

No one answered this little speech, which, in fact, was addressed to no one in particular.  It was, perhaps, not altogether Madame Lavaux’ fault that through long habit her instincts as the proprietor of a large hotel had ended by predominating so far over her instincts as a woman as always to come to hand first.  The nice adjustment between the claims of conscience and the claims of self-interest, between the demands of her bills and the demands of never-satisfied, exacting travellers, alone involved a daily recurring struggle, in which the softer emotions would have been altogether out of place, we may suppose.  In the present instance she considered it a hard case that her house should be turned topsy-turvy at such an untimely hour, and its general propriety endangered thereby; and Madelon’s grief, which at another time would have excited her compassion, had for the moment taken the unexpected form of determined opposition, and could only be looked upon as another element of disturbance.  Madelon herself, however, who could hardly be expected to regard her father’s accident with a view to those wider issues that naturally presented themselves to Madame Lavaux, simply felt that she was being cruelly ill-used.  She had not attended to a word of this last speech, but nevertheless she had detected the want of sympathy, and it by no means increased her desire to accede to Madame’s wishes.

“I will go to papa,” she repeated, the sense of antagonism that had come uppermost gaining strength and vehemence from the consciousness of the underlying grief and sore trouble that had aroused it, “or I will stay here if you will not let me pass; rather than go away I will stand here all night.”