I do not believe that; I love Soeur Lucie, she
was always kind to me, and never quarrelled with any one. Oh!
even if I had not made that promise to papa, I could never,
never, have been a nun; I have done well in running away."
She walked on for a long time, her thoughts running on the
scenes she had left behind, on the last two years of her life;
she had no remorse now, no regrets at their having come to an
end. To our lively, independent, excitable Madelon, they had,
as we know, been years of restraint, of penance, of utter
weariness; and never, perhaps, had she felt them to be so more
keenly than in these first moments of her release. But she
would have found them harder still without the memory of
Monsieur Horace, and her promise to him, to fill her heart and
imagination, and her thoughts reverted to him now; how, when
she had made his fortune, she would take it all to him; how he
would look, what he would say. This was a little picture the
child was never weary of imagining to herself. She filled it
in with a hundred different backgrounds, to suit the fancy of
the moment; she tinted it with the brightest colours.
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