I said my prayers--and believed. If she were alive now, I would
say, 'Go to her, and she will tell thee of all these things'--
but do not speak of them to me. Old Karl Wendler is neither
good, nor wise, nor believing enough to instruct thee, an
innocent child."

He made this little speech very gently and solemnly; then
turned away abruptly, took up his hat, and left the room
without another word. Madelon stood still for a minute
baffled, repulsed, with a sort of bruised, sore feeling at her
heart, and yet with a new sense of wondering pity, roused by
something in his words and manner; then she too left the room,
and though the darkness crept softly downstairs.

So ended this little episode with the violinist. Not that she
did not visit and sit with him as much as before; the very
next day, when she returned, rather shyly, upstairs, she found
him sitting in the old place, with the old nod and smile to
welcome her, but somehow he managed to put things on a
different footing--he spared her his long metaphysical
discourses, and talked to her more as the child that she was,
laughing, joking, and telling her queer hobgoblin and fairy
stories, some of which she knew before indeed, but which he
related with a quaint simplicity and naïveté, which gave them
a fresh charm for her; and under this new aspect of things,
she brightened up, began to lose her fits of dreaminess, to
chatter as in old times, and cheered many an hour of the
musician's solitary life. The American artist, too, left
Florence about this time for a visit to Rome; and during his
absence the _atelier_ was closed, and wandering through churches