Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 4, 2025
"I will go at once," replied Graham, "whilst he is sleeping; he is not likely to rouse again just a present; don't let him talk or move if he should awake, but it is not probable that he will." So it was arranged, and Madame Lavaux established herself with her knitting in the dim, silent room, whilst Graham departed on his errand, satisfied that his patient was in safe hands.
"Very well, then, if you will sit with him now, I will go and speak to Madame Lavaux, if she is up; there are several arrangements I have to make."
She would pretend to be asleep, she thought, and then no one would disturb her. The footsteps passed on, but presently the door did open, and some one looked in: it was Madame Lavaux, who, seeing that Madelon made no sign, concluded that she was asleep, and went away softly, with a kind pity in her heart for the desolate child.
Madame Lavaux had enough to do and to think of for the next hour, we may be sure, and though, at the end of that time, Madame la Comtesse found the ring safe in the corner of her pocket, whither it had slipped off her finger, and the disturbance was at an end, not so were the consequences of that disturbance. For in the meantime a very different scene was being acted out upstairs. Madam's Vigil.
What was to become of this poor child, clinging so closely to her father, and so dependent upon him that she seemed to have no thoughts nor ideas apart from him? Graham had been questioning Madame Lavaux as to what she knew of M. Linders and his life, and had gained much information on some points, though very little on others.
He scarcely glanced at the small daughter, now presented to him for the first time; and he bade Madame Lavaux, the mistress of the hotel, "make haste and finish with all that," when, with tearful voice, and discursive minuteness, she related to him the history of his wife's last days.
Madelon herself, however, who could hardly be expected to regard her father's accident with a view to those wider issues that naturally presented themselves to Madame Lavaux, simply felt that she was being cruelly ill-used.
"I need not go upstairs," she said, with trembling lips and tears in her eyes. "I may go into my own room, may I not?" "Your room? Which is that?" asked Graham. "This one next to papa," she said, pointing to the door that led into the passage. "Yes, you can stay there if you like; but don't you think you would be better with Madame Lavaux, than all by yourself in there?"
"We had arranged that her nurse should take her away to her own home in the country," said Madame Lavaux. "That will do," he answered; and was about to leave the room, when the nurse, an honest countrywoman, interposed once more, to inquire where she should write to Monsieur to give him tidings of his little daughter. "I want none," he replied.
For nearly two years M. Linders was absent from Paris, wandering about, as his habit was, from one town to another, a free man, as he would himself have expressed it, except for the one tie which he acknowledged only in the sums of money he sent from time to time, with sufficient liberality, to Madame Lavaux. No news reached him of his child, and he demanded none.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking