and earnestness to find scope in the
loftiest aspirations of a convent life--all this can never now
be known. Something there was in her character which, under
certain conditions, might have developed in such a direction.
The time might, indeed, surely would have come, had she
remained in the convent, when a sudden need and hunger for
sympathy, and perhaps excitement, would have risen in her
soul, too keen and imperative to be satisfied with past
memories; and when, in the absence of all support and
friendship in the outer world, she might have seized on
whatever she could find in the narrow circle in which she
moved, to still that imperious craving. Not in vain, then,
might have appeared those old dreams and visions in Florence
long ago. Madelon might have learnt to find in them a new and
deep significance, an interpretation in accordance with her
latest teaching, and through the dim years they might have
come back to her--prophetic warnings, as she might have been
taught to consider them--linking themselves with present
influences, to urge her on to one course. Her father's last
command, her own promises, sacred as she held them now, might
have availed nothing then, against what she might have been
taught to consider a voice from on high, a call of more than
earthly authority.

Such, we say, might have been the turn things would have taken
with Madelon, had the uninterrupted, monotonous convent life
continued to be hers. But long before her mind was prepared
for any such influences, early in the third year after her
father's death, certain events occurred, which brought this
period of her history to an abrupt close.

How, or why the fever broke out--whether it was the result of a
damp, unhealthy winter, or through infection brought by one of
the school-children, or from any other obvious cause, we need
not inquire here. It first showed itself about the middle of
February, and within a fortnight half the nuns had taken it,
the school was broken up, and the whole convent turned into a
hospital for the sick and dying.

Two of the sisters died within the first week or two; one was
very old, so old, indeed, that the fever seemed to be only the
decisive touch needed to extinguish the feeble life, that had
been uncertainly wavering for months previously; the other was
younger, and much beloved. And then came a sense as of some
general great calamity, a sort of awe-struck mourning, with
which real grief had, perhaps,