It was only three days since he had last seen the white walls
and grey roofs that were growing quite familiar to him now,
and yet how life seemed to have changed its whole aspect to
him--and not to him only, perhaps, but to somebody else too,
who within those walls had been spending three of the saddest,
dreariest days her small life had ever known.
When Graham asked for Madelon, he was shown, not into the
parlour, but into a corridor leading to it from the outer
door; straw chairs were placed here also, on either side of
the grating that divided it down the middle, and on the inner
side was a window looking into another and smaller courtyard.
As Graham sat there waiting, an inner door opened and a number
of children came trooping out; they were the _externes_,
children of the bourgeois class for the most part, who came to
school twice a-day at the convent; indeed they were the only
pupils, the building not being large enough to accommodate
boarders.
The children, laughing and chattering, vanished through the
front door to disperse to their different homes, and then, in
a minute, the inner door opened again, and a small figure
appeared; a nun followed, but she remained in the background,
whilst Madelon came forward with a look of eager expectation
on the mignonne face that seemed to have grown thinner and
paler since Graham had last seen it only three days ago.
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