“Could you?” said Graham absently; he did not follow out her thought in the least, and, in fact, hardly heard what she said, for the words were suggestive to him also, and carried with them their own train of ideas.

“Yes, and I will too,” says Madelon, in one brief moment conceiving, weighing, and forming a great resolution.  “Ah, I know how to do it—­I know, and I will; I promise you, and I always keep my promises, you know.  I promised papa that I would never become a nun, and I never will.”

“Indeed, I cannot fancy you a nun at all,” said Graham, rousing himself, and getting up.  “Don’t you think we had better be going back to the hotel now?  It is getting quite late.”

“And when your fortune is made, may I come and live with you?” said Madelon, without moving.

“We shall see about that afterwards,” he answered, smiling, “there is time enough to think about it, you may be sure.  Come, Madelon, we must be going.”

“Ah, you do not know, and I will not tell you,” said Madelon, jumping up as she spoke.

“What do I not know?” asked Graham, taking her hand in his, as they walked off together.

“What I will do—­it is my secret, but you will see—­yes, you will see, I promise you that.”

She almost danced with glee as she walked along at Graham’s side.  He did not understand what she was talking about; he had missed the first sentence that might have given him the clue, and merely supposed that it was some childish mystery with which she was amusing herself.

But Madelon understood full well, and her busy little brain was full of plans and projects as she walked along.  Make a fortune! how many fortunes had she not seen made in a day—­in an hour!  “Give me only ten francs, et je ferai fortune!” The old speech that she had quoted years ago to Horace Graham—­ though, indeed, she had no remembrance of having done so—­was familiar to her now as then.  Ah! she knew how fortunes were made, and Monsieur Horace did not—­that was strange, but it was evident to her—­and she would not tell him.  Her superior knowledge on this point was a hidden treasure, for a great ambition had suddenly fired our ten-year-old Madelon.  Not only in maturer years are great plans laid, great campaigns imagined, great victories fought for; within the narrow walls of many a nursery, on the green lawns of many a garden, the mimic fort is raised, the siege-train laid, the fortress stormed; and in many a tiny head the germs of the passions and ambitions and virtues of later years are already working out for themselves such paths as surrounding circumstances will allow them to find.  But Madelon’s childhood had known neither nursery nor sheltered home-garden.  Her earliest experiences had been amidst the larger ventures of life, the deeper interests that gather round advancing years; her playground had been the salons of the gayest watering-places in Europe, her playthings the roulette-board and the little gold and