aged on some piece of
embroidery when he first began talking, but gradually her
hands had dropped into her lap, and with her eyes fixed on him
in the frankest unconsciousness, she had become utterly
absorbed in what he was saying. Graham's whole heart was in
his work, past and present, and this rapt naive interest on
the part of the girl at once flattered and encouraged him.

"I can trust you two," he said, putting away his papers at
last, "and I am not forestalling my public too much in letting
you hear all this; but you are my first auditors, and my first
critics. You won't betray me, Madelon?" he added, turning to
her with a smile.

She shook her head, smiling back at him without speaking; and
then, rising, began to fold up her work, while Mrs. Treherne
said,--

"I should have thought you would have found your first
audience at Ashurst."

"I did try it one evening," he said, "but one of the children
began to scream, and Georgie had to go and attend to it; and
the Doctor went to sleep, and Maria, who had been all the
afternoon in a stuffy school-room, looking after a school-
feast or something of the sort, told me not to mind her, and
presently went to sleep too; so I gave it up, after that."

"It was certainly not encouraging," said Mrs. Treherne; "but
you must surely have fallen upon an unfortunate moment; they
do not go to sleep every evening, I presume?"

He did not answer; he was looking at Madelon, his eyes
following her as she moved here and there about the room,
putting away her work, closing the piano, setting things in
order for the night. It was a habit he had taken up, this of
watching her whenever they were in the room together,
wondering perhaps how his little Madelon had grown into one of
the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Indeed she was
little Madelon no longer--and yet not wholly altered after all.
She was tall now, above the middle height, and her hair was a
shade darker, and fastened up in long plaits at the back of
her head; but her cheeks were pale as in old days, and a
slight accent, an occasional idiom, something exceptional in
style, and gesture, and manner, showed at once and
unmistakably, her foreign birth and breeding. As Mrs. Treherne
had once said, she had not, and never would have, an English
air and complexion; but her beauty was not the less refined
and rare that the clear, fair cheeks were without a tinge of
colour, that one had to seek it in the pure red lips, the