rnful song. As she gazed, the tears began to gather in
her eyes; she tried to read the letter again, and the big
drops fell on the paper, already stained with other tears that
had been dried ever so many years ago. But it was already too
dark, she could hardly see the words; she laid the paper down
and began to cry.

It was not the first part of the letter that moved her so
much, though there was something in her that responded to the
devoted, loving words; but she had not the key to their
meaning. She knew nothing of her mother's life, nor of her
causes for unhappiness; and for the moment she did not draw
the inferences that to an older and more experienced person
would have been at once obvious. It was the allusion to
herself that was making Madelon cry with a tender little self-
pity. The child was so weary of the convent, was feeling so
friendless and so homeless just then, that this mention of the
little empty bed that sometime and somewhere had been prepared
and waiting to receive her, awoke in her quite a new longing,
such as she had never had before, for a home and a mother, and
kind protection and care, like other children. When at last
she folded the letter up, it was to put it carefully away in
the little box that contained her few treasures. It belonged
to a life in which she somehow felt she had some part, though
it lay below the horizon of her own memories and
consciousness.

Only then, as Madelon prepared to put back the things that she
had taken out of the trunk, did it occur to her to look if
anything else remained in the pocket of the black silk gown.
There was not much--only a half-used pencil, a small key, and a
faded red silk netted purse. There was money in this last--at
one end a few sous and about six francs in silver, at the
other twenty francs in gold.

CHAPTER X.

Out of the Convent.

"I think you might very well come down to vespers to-night,
_mon enfant_," said Soeur Lucie one evening about a week later.

"To-night!" said Madelon, starting.

"Yes; why not? You are quite well and strong enough now, and
we must set to work again. I think you have been idle long
enough, and we can't begin better than by your coming to
chapel this evening."

Madelon was silent and dismayed. Ever since she had found the
money her project of flight had become a question of time
only, and it was precisely this hour of vespers she had fixed
on as the only one possible for her escape: the nuns woul