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The loss of the sweet dreams which the spring awakens in the human heart is not one of the least losses of life. Though the spring be unfulfilled, it sweetens the year. Just before Madelon reached Lot Gordon's house, she met Burr going to court Dorothy. They were to be married in two weeks more. Madelon and Burr exchanged a murmur of salutations and passed each other.
But later they had yielded, for their pride was undermined by their own gloomy convictions as to Madelon, which they confided not to one another. However, the boy Richard still greeted Burr surlily, with a fierce black flash under frowning brows, and scarcely spoke to Madelon at all until the day before her marriage. That was set some two months after Dorothy's.
Madelon listened, white and still, saying not a word; and she said nothing when, up in their chamber, whither she went to take off her bonnet, Burr, who had followed, took her in his arms, and they stood together, looking at each other and trembling. Knowing not, and never to know, the whole which he had done for them, they yet knew enough.
He looked down the room to the spot where Madelon and Cydalise were standing, side by side, admiring Madame Frehlter's poodle. Madelon could afford to be civil to the poodle before company. The contrast between the two girls was sufficiently striking. Cydalise was fair and bright-looking Mademoiselle Frehlter was square and ungainly of figure, swarthy of complexion, dark of brow.
I thought my responsibility had ceased from the moment you took charge of her; but for her father's sake does Madelon ever speak of him, by-the-by?" "Never." "Never alludes to her past life?" "Never we never speak of it; I have carefully avoided doing so, in the hope that with time, and a settled home, and new interests, she could cease to think of it altogether; and I trust I have succeeded.
Madelon nodded. "Where's yours?" "I can't have him." Dexter Beers still moved on with curious lateral twirls of his shoulders and heaves of his great chest, with its row of shining waistcoat buttons. "Pooty cold day for a sleigh-ride," he observed, with a great steam of breath. "I'll pay you well for the horse," said Madelon, in a hard voice. She followed him into the stable.
The gardens are full of pomegranate and orange trees, and the hills are terraced with vineyards, and covered with olives and chestnuts everywhere else. Do you think that that sounds inviting?" "A great deal too good to be true," said Mrs. Vavasour, laughing. "I never believe thoroughly in these earthly paradises." But Madelon did not laugh; her eyes lighted up, her cheeks glowed.
The spirit of resistance was laid for the time in this poor Madelon Hautville, but it had yielded, after all, more to the will of her own reason than to Jim Otis's mother or the weariness of her own flesh. When Mrs. Otis came down-stairs she was flushed with pleasant motherly victory.
I will pay your country so much of a compliment as that, Monsieur Horace, or rather I shall be sorry to leave some of the English people Aunt Barbara, I do not like to think of her alone; she will miss me, she says." "I should not wonder if she did, Madelon."
Even in after years, when, reading the history of these early days in a new light, she suffered a pang for almost every pleasure she had then enjoyed, even then Madelon maintained that her childhood had been one of unclouded happiness, such as few children know.
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