"And you always keep your promises, I know," said Graham, smiling at her.
"Ah, do not," she cried, suddenly covering her face with her hands, "don't speak of that, Monsieur Horace—I know now—ah, yes, I understand what you must have thought—but I did not then; indeed I was only a child then, I did not know what I was doing."
"I don't think you are much more than a child now," said Graham, taking one of her hands in his; "you are not much altered, after all, Madelon."
"Am I not?" she said. "But I have tried to improve; I have worked very hard, I thought it would please you, and that you would be glad to find me different—and I am different," she added, with a sudden pathetic change in her voice. "I understand a great deal now that I never thought of before; I think of the old life, but it is not all with pleasure, and I know why Aunt Barbara—and yet I do love it so much, and you are a part of it, Monsieur Horace—when you speak your vice seems to bring it back; and you call me Madelon—no one else calls me Madelon—" Her voice broke down.
"You are not happy, my dear little girl," said Graham, in his old kind way, and trying to laugh off her emotion. "I shall have to prescribe for you. What shall it be?—a course of balls and theatres? What should Aunt Barbara say to that?"
"She would not employ you for a doctor again, I think," said Madelon, smiling. "No, I am not unhappy, Monsieur Horace—only dull sometimes; and Aunt Barbara would say, that is on account of my foreign education. I know she thinks all foreigners frivolous and ill educated; I have heard her say so."
When Madelon went to her room that night, she sat long over her fire, pondering, girl-fashion, on her talk with Horace Graham. The tones of his voice were still ringing in her ears; she seemed still to see his kind look, to feel the friendly grasp of his hand; and as she thought of him, her familiar little bed-room, with its white curtained bed, and pictured walls, and well-filled bookshelves, seemed to vanish, and she saw herself again, a desolate child, sitting at the window of the Paris hotel that hot August night her father died, weeping behind the convent grating, crouched on the damp earth in the dark avenues of the Promenade à Sept Heures. He had not changed in all these years, she thought; he had come back kind and good as ever, to be her friend and protector, as he had always been; and he had said she was not altered much either, and yet she was—ah! so altered from the unconscious, unthinking, ignorant child he had left. She began to pace up and down the room, where indeed she had spent many a wakeful night before now, thinking, reflecting, reasoning, trying to make out the clue to her old life—striving to reconcile it with the new life around her—not too successfully on the whole. How was it she had first discovered the want of harmony between them? How was it she had first learnt to appreciate the gulf that separated the experiences of her first years, from the pure, peaceful life she was leading now? She could hardly have told; no one had revealed it to her, no one had spoken of it; but in a thousand unconsidered ways—in talk, in books, in the unconscious influences of her every-day surroundings, she had come to understand the true meaning of her father's life, and to know that the memory of these early days, that she had found so bright and happy, was something never to be spoken of, to be hidden away—a disgrace to her, even, perhaps. Aunt Barbara never would let her talk of them, would have blotted them out, if possible; she had wondered why at first—she understood well enough now, and resented the enforced silence. She only cherished the thought of them, and of her father the more; she only clung to her old love for him the more desperately, because it must be in secret; and she longed at times, with a sad, inexpressible yearning, for something of the old brightness that had died out one mournful night nearly eight years ago, when she had talked with her father for the last time.
"I think I must be a hundred years old," the girl would say to herself sometimes, after returning from one of those little parties of which she had spoken to Graham, where she had spent the evening in the company of a dozen other young ladies of her own age, all white muslin and sash-ribbons. "These girls, how tiresome they all are!—how they chatter and laugh, and what silly jokes they make! How can it amuse them? But they are still in the school-room, as Aunt Barbara is always telling me; and before that, they were all in the nursery, I suppose; they do not know anything about life; their only experiences concern nurses and governesses; whilst I—I—ah! is it possible I am no older than they are?"
She would lean her arms on the window-sill, and look out on the midnight sky; the Abbey chimes would ring out over the great city, overhead the stars would be shining perhaps, but down below, between the trees in the Park, a great glare would show where a million lamps were keeping watch till dawn. Shall we blame our Madelon, if she sometimes looked away from the stars, and down upon the glare that brightened far up into the dark sky? All the young blood was throbbing and stirring in her veins with such energy and vigour; the world was so wide, so wide, the circle around her so narrow, and in that bright, misty past, which, after all, she only half understood, were to be found so many precedents for possibilities that might still be hidden in the future. Shall we blame her, if, in her youthful belief in happiness as the chief good, her youthful impatience of peace, and calm, and rest, she longed with a great longing for movement, change, excitement? Outside, as it seemed to her, in her vague young imagination, such a free, glorious life was going on—and she had no part in it! As she stood at her window, the distant, ceaseless roar of the street traffic would sound to her, in the stillness of the night, like the beat of the great waves of life that for ever broke and receded, before they could touch the weary spot where she stood spell-bound in isolation. And through it all she said to herself, "When Monsieur Horace comes home,"—and now Monsieur Horace had come, would he do anything to help her?
Graham, indeed, was willing enough to do what he could do for her; and before he went to bed that night he wrote the following letter to his sister, Mrs. Vavasour: