" And indeed she did
not know; nor even if she had, could she have found the words
with which to have explained it to him. It was, after all, the
old German who won her confidence at last. There was, as we
have said, something simple, genuine, homely about the old
man; a reminiscence, perhaps, of his homely Fatherland still
clinging about him, after more than forty years of voluntary
exile, which Madelon could well appreciate, though she could
not have defined it; for a child judges more by instinct than
reflection, and it was through no long process of reasoning
that she had arrived at the certainty that she would be met
here by neither contempt nor indifference. Moreover, his
generally lofty and slightly incomprehensible style of
conversation, and the endless stores of learning with which
she had innocently accredited him, had surrounded him with
that vague halo of wisdom and goodness, so dear to the hearts
of children of larger as of smaller growth, and which they are
so eager to recognize, that they do not always distinguish
between the false and the true.
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