old tales of the days when, as we sometimes fancy, looking
back through the mist of centuries, there were giants on the
earth, but all new and fresh to our little Madelon, and with a
touch or romance and poetry about them as told by the
enthusiastic artist, which readily seized her imagination;
indeed he himself, with his black velvet cap, and short pipe,
and old coat, became somehow ennobled and idealised in her
simple mind by his association through his art with the mighty
men he was teaching her to reverence.

Madelon spent much of her time in the painter's _atelier_, for
her father took it into his head this winter to try his hand
once more at his long-neglected art, and, armed with brushes
and palette, passed many of his leisure hours in his friend's
society. We cannot accredit M. Linders with any profound
penetration, or with any subtle perception of what was working
in his little daughter's mind, but with the most far-reaching
wisdom he could hardly have devised better means, at this
crisis in her life, for maintaining his old hold upon her, and
keeping up the sense of sympathy between them, which had in
one instance been disturbed and endangered.

She was just beginning to be conscious of the existence of a
new and glorious world, where money-making was, on the whole,
in abeyance, and roulette-tables and croupiers had apparently
no existence at all; and the sight of her father at his easel
day after day, at once connected him with it, as it were,
since he also could produce pictures--_tout comme un autre_. Then
M. Linders could talk well on most subjects, and in the
discussions that the two men would not unfrequently hold