"I _will_ go to papa!" cries Madelon, trembling with agitation
and excitement; "he will want me, I know he will, I am never
in his way! You have no right to prevent my going to him,
Madame! Let me pass, I say," for Madame Lavaux was standing
between her and the door of the room into which M. Linders had
been carried.

"_Allons donc_, we must be reasonable," says Madame. "Your papa
does not want you now, and little girls should do as they are
told. If you had gone to bed an hour ago, as I advised, you
would have known nothing about all this till to-morrow. Eh,
these children! there is no doing anything with them; and
these men," she continued, with a sigh, "the noise they make
with their great boots! and precisely Madame la Comtesse, au
_premier_, had an _attaque des nerfs_ this evening, and said the
house was as noisy as a barrack--but these things always happen
at unfortunate moments!"

No one answered this little speech, which, in fact, was
addressed to no one in particular. It was, perhaps, not
altogether Madame Lavaux' fault that through long habit her
instincts as the proprietor of a large hotel had ended by
predominating so far over her instincts as a woman as always
to come to hand first. The nice adjustment between the claims
of conscience and the claims of self-interest, between the
demands of her bills and the demands of never-satisfied,
exacting travellers, alone involved a daily recurring
struggle, in which the softer emotions would have been
altogether out of place, we may suppose. In the present