"Here!" cries Madelon, with much contempt; "why, no. One meets nothing but bourgeois here."
Graham was infinitely amused.
"Am I a bourgeois?" he said, laughing.
"I don't know," she replied, looking at him; "but you are not a milord, I know, for I heard papa asking Mademoiselle Cécile about you, and she said you were not a milord at all."
"So you care for nothing but Counts and Princes?"
"I don't know," she said again. Then with an evident sense that such abstract propositions would involve her beyond her depth, she added, "Have you any other pretty things to show me? I should like to see what else you have on your chain."
In five minutes more they were fast friends, and Madelon, seated on Graham's knee, was chattering away, and recounting to him all the history of her short life. He was not long in perceiving that her father was the beginning and end of all her ideas—her one standard of perfection, the one medium through which, small as she was, she was learning to look out on and estimate the world, and receiving her first impressions of life. She had no mother, she said, in answer to Graham's inquiries. Maman had died when she was quite a little baby; and though she seemed to have some dim faint recollection of having once lived in a cottage in the country, with a woman to take care of her, everything else referred to her father, from her first, vague floating memories to the time when she could date them as distinct and well-defined, facts. She had once had a nurse, she said, —a long time ago that was, when she was little—but papa did not like her, and so she went away; and now she was too big for one. Papa did everything for her, it appeared, from putting her to sleep at night, when Mademoiselle was disposed to be wakeful, to nursing her when she was ill, taking her to fêtes on grand holidays, buying her pretty things, walking with her, teaching her dancing, and singing, and reading; and she loved him so much—ah! so much! Indeed, in all the world, the child had but one object for a child's boundless powers of trust and love and veneration, and that one was her father.
"And where do you generally live now?" asked Graham.
"Why, nowhere in particular," Madelon answered. "Of course not—they were always travelling about. Papa had to go to a great many places. They had come last from Spa, and before that they had been at Wiesbaden and Homburg, and last winter they had spent at Nice: and now they were on their way to Paris."
"And do you and your papa always live alone? Have you not an uncle?" enquired Graham, remembering the Belgian's speech about the brother-in-law.