It was like a sigh from the past.  Still holding the paper in her hand, Madelon leant her head against the window-frame and looked out.  The sun had set, the trees were blowing about, black against the clear pale yellow of the evening sky, overhead stars were shining faintly here and there, the wind was sighing and scattering the faint-scented petals of the over-blown roses.  Half unconsciously, Madelon felt that the scene, the hour, were in harmony with the pathos of the brown, faded words, like a chord struck in unison with the key-note of a mournful song.  As she gazed, the tears began to gather in her eyes; she tried to read the letter again, and the big drops fell on the paper, already stained with other tears that had been dried ever so many years ago.  But it was already too dark, she could hardly see the words; she laid the paper down and began to cry.

It was not the first part of the letter that moved her so much, though there was something in her that responded to the devoted, loving words; but she had not the key to their meaning.  She knew nothing of her mother’s life, nor of her causes for unhappiness; and for the moment she did not draw the inferences that to an older and more experienced person would have been at once obvious.  It was the allusion to herself that was making Madelon cry with a tender little self-pity.  The child was so weary of the convent, was feeling so friendless and so homeless just then, that this mention of the little empty bed that sometime and somewhere had been prepared and waiting to receive her, awoke in her quite a new longing, such as she had never had before, for a home and a mother, and kind protection and care, like other children.  When at last she folded the letter up, it was to put it carefully away in the little box that contained her few treasures.  It belonged to a life in which she somehow felt she had some part, though it lay below the horizon of her own memories and consciousness.

Only then, as Madelon prepared to put back the things that she had taken out of the trunk, did it occur to her to look if anything else remained in the pocket of the black silk gown.  There was not much—­only a half-used pencil, a small key, and a faded red silk netted purse.  There was money in this last—­at one end a few sous and about six francs in silver, at the other twenty francs in gold.

CHAPTER X.

Out of the Convent.

“I think you might very well come down to vespers to-night, mon enfant,” said Soeur Lucie one evening about a week later.

“To-night!” said Madelon, starting.

“Yes; why not?  You are quite well and strong enough now, and we must set to work again.  I think you have been idle long enough, and we can’t begin better than by your coming to chapel this evening.”

Madelon was silent and dismayed.  Ever since she had found the money her project of flight had become a question of time only, and it was precisely this hour of vespers she had fixed on as the only one possible for her escape:  the nuns would all be in the chapel, and, once outside the convent, the increasing darkness would favour her.