pe nor pine, that was not her way;
but she became possessed with a spirit of restless petulance,
which at first, indeed, was only another phase of unhappiness,
but which, not being recognized as such, presently developed
into a most decided wilfulness. She turned impatiently from
the nun's well-meant kindness and efforts to console her,
which somehow were not what she wanted--not that, but something
so different, poor child!--she was cross, peevish, fractious
without intending it, scarcely knowing why; the nuns set her
down as a perverse unamiable child: and so it happened, that
she had not been many weeks in the convent before she came to
be regarded with general disfavour and indifference instead of
with the kindly feeling that had at first been shown to the
forlorn little stranger.

Graham had indeed wasted some pity on her, in imagining her
under the immediate control of her aunt. The Superior had far
too many things to think about for her to trouble herself with
any direct superintendence of her little niece; Madelon hardly
ever saw her, and in fact, of the convent life in general she
knew but little. Her lessons she soon began to do with the
other children in the class, and for the rest she was placed
under the special care of one of the younger Sisters, Soeur
Lucie by name.

Like Madelon, Soeur Lucie had been brought, a little ten-year-
old orphan to the convent, to be under the care of one of the
nuns who was her aunt; and it was, perhaps, on this account,
that she was chosen by Mademoiselle Linders as a sort of
_gouvernante_ for her niece. But there was no other resemblance
between this placid, fair-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked
Flemish girl, whose early recollections were all of farms and
farmyards, of flat grassy meadows watered by slow moving
streams, of red cows feeding tranquilly in rich pastures, of
milking, and cheese-making, and butter-making, of dairies with
shining pots and pans and spotless floors, and our vehement
brown-eyed Madelon, who in her ten years had seen more of the
world than Soeur Lucie was likely to see if she lived to be a
hundred. Soeur Lucie had passed a happy, peaceful childhood in
the convent, and, as she grew up into girlhood, had listened
submissively to the words of exhortation which urged her to
give up the world and its vanities, which she had never known,
and by such voluntary renunciation to pass from a state of
mere negative virtue into that one of superior holiness