strange unreal semblance of reality, associating themselves
with every glowing sunset, with every starry sky, till the
pictures themselves that had suggested them looked pale by
comparison.

She was, in fact, going through a mental crisis, such as, in
other circumstances, and under fostering influences, has
produced more than one small ecstatic enthusiast; the infant
shining light of some Methodist conventicle; the saintly child
visionary of some Catholic convent. But Madelon had no one to
foster, nor to interpret for her these feverish visions, so
inexplicable to herself, poor child! To the good-natured,
careless, jovial American, she would not have even hinted at
them for worlds, and not less carefully did she shun appealing
to her father for sympathy. That contemptuous "_vraiment_" dwelt
in her memory, not as a matter of resentment, but as something
to be avoided henceforth at the cost of any amount of self-
repression. She would sit leaning her languid little head on
his shoulder; but when he anxiously asked her what ailed her,
she could only reply, "I don't know, papa." 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