sunny out-of-door life, to walk home with the painter through
the bright narrow streets, listening to his gay careless talk,
and lingering, perhaps, at some stall, in the busy market-
place, to buy grapes and figs; and then to take a walk with
her father into the country, where roses nodded at her over
garden walls, and vines were yellowing beneath the autumn sky.
Her sensitive perception of beauty and grandeur was so much
greater than her power of grasping and comprehending them,
that her poor little mind became oppressed and bewildered by
the disproportion between the vividness with which she
received new impressions, and her ability for seizing their
meaning.

The pictures themselves, which, before long, she learnt to
delight in, and even in some sort to appreciate, were a
perpetual source of perplexity to her in the unknown subjects
they represented. Her want of knowledge in such matters was so
complete that her American friend, who, no doubt, took it for
granted that she had been brought up in the religion of the
country, never even guessed at it, not imagining that a child
could remain so utterly uninstructed in the simple facts and
histories; and, somehow, Madelon divined this, and began to
have a shy reluctance in asking questions which would betray
an unsuspected ignorance. "This is such or such a Madonna,"
the artist would say; "there you see St. Elizabeth, and that
is St. John the Baptist, you know." Or he would point out St.
Agnes, or St. Cecilia, or St. Catherine, as the case might be.

"Who was St. Catherine?" Madelon ventured to ask one day.

"Did you never hear of her?" he answered. "Well then, I will
tell you all about her. There were, in fact, two St.
Catherines, but this one here, who, you see, has a wheel,
lived long before the other. There once dwelt in Alexandria a
lovely and accomplished maiden--" And he would no doubt have
related to her the whole of the beautiful old mystical legend;
but her father, who happened to be with them that day,
interrupted him.

"Don't stuff the child's head with that nonsense," he said,
and, perhaps, afterwards gave his friend a hint; for Madelon
heard no more about the saints, and was left to puzzle out
meanings and stories for the pictures for herself--and queer
enough ones she often made, very likely. On the other hand,
the American, who liked to talk to her in his own tongue, and
to make her chatter to him in return, would tell her many a
story of the ol