hands, tapers burning at her head and feet, with the hard lines fixed on her cold grey face; and yet she also had been a little, soft, round child, with yearnings too, like other children, for a mother’s kisses and a mother’s love.  “Go away, Adolphe, you are very naughty, and I do not love you; mamma always kisses you, and she never, never kisses me!” This little speech, uttered by our poor saintly Superior when she was but eight years old, may perhaps give the key to much in her after life; and if we cannot, with an admiring sisterhood, henceforth count this unhappy, soured woman in our catalogue of saints, we will at least grant her a place amongst the great company of “might-have-beens,” most inscrutable problems in this puzzling life of ours, and so bid her a not unkindly farewell.

Madelon, meanwhile, knew nothing of these things; she had taken the fever also, and while death was busy in other parts of the convent, she lay unconscious in her little cell, tossing in delirium, or lying in feverish stupor, with Soeur Lucie coming softly in and out.  In this desolated overworked household, the child had come to be considered as only another item of trouble, hardly of anxiety; for her life or death just then was felt to be of the very smallest consequence to any one.  The one tie that had bound her to the convent had been snapped by her aunt’s death; if she lives, think the nuns—­if indeed they find time to think of her at all—­she is a burthen on our hands; if she dies, well then, one more coffin and another grave.  This is perhaps the ebb-tide of Madelon’s importance in the world; never before has been, never again will be, we may trust, her existence of so little moment to any human being—­that existence which, meanwhile, in spite of all such indifference, in perfect unconsciousness of it indeed, is beginning to assert itself again.  For though the Superior had died amidst lamentations, and the places of Soeurs Eulalie and Marguerite will know them no more, our little Madelon, over whom there are none to lament or rejoice, will live.

One afternoon she awoke, as from a long sleep.  The low sun was shining into the cell, lighting up the wooden crucifix on the white-washed wall; Soeur Lucie, in her strait coif and long black veil, was sitting by the bedside reading her book of hours; through the window could be seen a strip of blue sky crossed by some budding tree in the convent garden, little birds were beginning to chirp and twitter amongst the branches.  The spring had come in these last days whilst Madelon had been lying there, and in the midst of the glad resurrection of all nature, she too was stirring and awakening to consciousness, and a new life.

CHAPTER VIII.

Madelon overhears a Conversation.