Sometimes she would be allowed to accompany Soeur
Lucie to the big kitchen, and assist in the grand compote-
making, which seemed to be going on at all seasons of the
year. There, sometimes helping, sometimes perched on her
favourite seat on the corner of the table, Madelon would
forget her sorrows for awhile in the contemplation of the old
farm-kitchen with its rough white-washed walls, decorated with
pots and pans, and shining kettles, its shelves with endless
rows of blue and white crockery, its great black rafters
crossing below the high-pitched ceiling leaving a gloomy
space, full of mystery to Madelon's imagination; and then,
below, the long white wooden table, the piles of fruit, the
busy figures of the nuns as they moved to and fro. Outside in
the courtyard the sun would be shining perhaps, the trees
would wave, and cast flickering shadows on Madelon, as she
sat, the pigeons would come fluttering and perching on the
window-sill, and Soeur Lucie, whilst paring, cutting, boiling,
skimming, would crone out for Madelon's benefit the old tales
she knew so well that she could almost have repeated them in
her sleep. Madelon only begged to be let off the tragical
ending, which she could not bear, at last always stopping her
ears when the critical moment of the sword, or the wheel, or
the fire approached. She took great interest in the history of
Ste. Therese, especially in the account of her running away in
her childhood, which seemed to her most worthy of imitation--
only, thinks Madelon, she would have taken care not to have
been caught, and brought back again. The subsequent history of
the saint she found less edifying; nothing that savoured of
conventual life found favour in Madelon's eyes in these days;
and indeed her whole faith in saints and legends was rudely
shaken one day by a broad and somewhat reckless assertion on
the part of Soeur Lucie, that all the female saints had been
nuns--an assertion certainly unsupported by the facts, whether
legendary or ascertained, but which had somehow become a fixed
idea in Soeur Lucie's mind, and was dear to the heart of the
little nun.

"They were not nuns like you, then," says Madelon at last,
after some combating of the point, "for they could go out, and
walk about, and do a great many things you must not do--and if
I were a saint, I would never, never become a nun!"

"But it is the nuns that have become saints," cries Soeur
Lucie, with the happiest conviction; and