"I will try," said Madelon. "Jeanne-Marie, how good you are to me!—whatever I want, you do for me!"
"That is nothing," said the woman, and went abruptly away to attend to her customers.
So, all the long summer days, Madelon sat through hot noontides in the shady garden below, through golden sunsets at the open window of her room above, stitching with silks and gold and silver thread, till her weak little fingers ached, and the task seemed as if it would never be done. Down in the homely neglected little garden, all a sweet tangle of flowers and weeds, she would seat herself; the birds would twitter overhead, the bees would come humming round her amongst the unpruned vines and roses that clambered everywhere, while the embroidery pattern slowly grew beneath her fingers. She worked steadily and well, but she could not work very fast; and she wearied, oh! how she wearied of it sometimes; but she never wavered in her purpose. "It is for Monsieur Horace," she would say, and begin again with fresh zeal. Through the open window of the little kitchen, which looked upon the garden, she could see Jeanne-Marie coming and going, chopping herbs, shelling peas and beans; and sometimes, when Madelon was too tired of her work, she would gladly throw it down, that she might help in these employments. "May I make an omelette, Jeanne-Marie?" she would say; "I know how to do it, if you will let me try." And the sight of Madelon flitting about the kitchen, busy among the pots and pans, seemed to stir some long-forgotten emotion in Jeanne-Marie's sad heart—too long-forgotten to be learnt anew without pain, for her eyes would fill with tears as she watched her. The child never went into the village, or, indeed, stirred beyond the garden; that was all the world to her just now, peopled by Jeanne-Marie, her hopes, and her embroidery.
Is it most strange or most natural, one wonders, that there are times when one small nook of earth shuts out, as it were, the whole universe from our eyes, when one personal interest occupies us to the exclusion of the whole world of action, and progress, and speculation, and thought? Thrones may topple over, nationalities be effaced, revolutions in politics, in religion, in science be effected, and all pass unheeded while we sit counting our own private loss and gain in love or friendship, in grief or joy. Whilst Madelon has been wearying out her little heart and brain in the pursuit of her self- imposed task, the world has not been, and is not, standing still, we may be sure, and her small wheel of life is somehow kept in motion by the great revolving circle of events, however little she may think of, or heed them. Sebastopol has fallen in these last months, the Crimean war is at an end, and all the world that was discussing battles and sieges when Horace Graham last parted with Madelon one September afternoon, is talking of treaties and peace now, as the allied armies move homewards from the East. And—which indeed would have had more interest for Madelon could she have known it— Graham himself, after more than two years' hard work, had been wounded in one of the last skirmishes; and with this wound, and the accompanying fever, had lain for weeks very near to death in the Scutari hospital, to be sent home at last, invalided to England. While Madelon had been slowly recovering from her fever in her little out-of-the-world refuge at Le Trooz, Graham had been gaining health and strength in a pleasant English home, with a sister to nurse and pet him, nephews and nieces to make much of him, and the rosiest cheeks and bluest eyes in the world to fall in love with, as he lay idly on the lawn through the summer days. It was at the house of his sister, who was married to a country doctor in Kent, that this double process of love-making and convalescence went on, with the greatest success and satisfaction to all parties; and it was Miss Maria Leslie, the ward of his brother-in-law, Dr. Vavasour, who was the owner of those bluest eyes and rosiest cheeks.
Meanwhile Madelon, stitching, stitching away at her work, thought vaguely of Monsieur Horace as being still in that far- off country from which he had last written to her, and wondered a little how soon a letter written to the English address he had given her would reach him. What would he say and think when he received it? And when, ah! when would she be able to write it? She worked on steadily, and yet it was already September when the last stitch was put in, and she could give the work to Jeanne-Marie. A few days afterwards the woman put thirty francs into her hands.
"There is your money," she said; "now what are you going to do with it?"
"I am going away," answered Madelon.
"Yes?" said Jeanne-Marie, without any apparent emotion, "and where are you going?"
"I am going to Spa. Ah! Jeanne-Marie, do not ask me what I am going to do; it is my secret, I cannot tell any one, but you shall know some day."
Jeanne-Marie was silent for a moment, then, "Look here, ma petite," she said; "I don't want to know what you are going to do; it is no concern of mine, and I cannot keep you if you want to go away; but who are you going to in Spa? I cannot let you go off without knowing where you are, and whether you are safe. You might have the fever again, or some one might try to take you back to the convent, and I should know nothing about it. Where are you going? Have you any friends at Spa?"