As for the Countess G----, there had been a flatness about the
termination of her share in Madelon's adventures that
effectually put a stop to any desire on her part to pursue the
matter further; and finding, on her arrival at Liege, that her
husband was obliged to start for Brussels that very afternoon,
she found it convenient altogether to dismiss the subject from
her mind. With her departure from Liege, we also gladly
dismiss her from these pages for ever.
So Madelon, tossing and moaning on her bed of sickness, is
once more all alone in the world, except for Jeanne-Marie, to
whom, before two days were over, she had somehow become the
one absorbing interest in life. The lonely woman, whose
sympathies and affections had, as one might guess, been all
bruised, and warped, and crushed in some desperate struggle,
or in some long agony, found a new channel for them in an
indescribable, yearning love for the little pale girl whom she
had rescued, and by whose side she sat hour after hour,
wondering, as she listened to her wild broken talk about her
father and Monsieur Horace, Aunt Therese, and Soeur Lucie, what
the child's past life could have been, and by what strange
chances she had come to be in such evil straits.
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