esolutions, that little sentence about sending the box away
had a chilling effect; it was like cutting off another link
between her and the world. Soeur Lucie went down on her knees
and began to uncord the trunk.

"Here is the key tied to it," she said; "now we shall see."

She raised the lid as she spoke, but at that moment a bell
began to ring.

"That is for vespers," she cried, "we must go; Madeleine, in a
few days you will be able to come to the chapel again; to-
night you can stay and take out these things. Ah, just as I
thought--there are clothes," she added, taking a hurried peep,
and then followed Soeur Marie out of the room.

Madelon approached the box with a certain awe mixed with her
curiosity. It was quite true that she had never seen what it
contained; she only knew that it had been her mother's, and
that various articles belonging to her had been put away in it
after her death. It had never been opened since, to her
knowledge; her father had once told her that she might have
the contents one day when she was a big girl, but that was all
she knew about it.

Madelon had no very keen emotion respecting the mother she had
never known; her father had spoken of her so seldom, and
everything in connection with her had so completely dropped
out of sight, that there had been no scope for the
imaginative, shadowy adoration with which children who have
early lost their mother are wont to regard her memory; her
father had been everything to her, and of her mother's brother
she had none but unpleasant recollections. But now, for the
first time, she was brought face to face with something that
had actually been her mother's, and it was with a sort of
instinctive reverence that she went up to the box and took out
one thing after another. There was some faint scent pervading
them all, which ever afterwards associated itself in Madelon's
mind with that hour in the narrow room and gathering twilight.

There was nothing apparently of the smallest value in the
trunk. Any trinkets that Madame Linders might once have
possessed had been parted with long before her death; and
anything else that seemed likely to produce money had been
sold afterwards. Here were nothing but linen clothes, which,
as Soeur Lucie had hinted, might be made available for Madelon;
a shawl, and a cloak of an old-fashioned pattern, a few worn
English books, with the name "Magdalen Moore" written on the
fly-leaf, at which Madelon looked curiously