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Updated: June 2, 2025
"But I am not a nun yet," thinks the poor child, clasping and unclasping her hands in her perplexity, and struggling with the conscience-stricken sense of naughtiness, which threatened at this last moment to overpower all her foregone conclusions, and disconcert her in spite of herself "I am not a nun yet, so it cannot be so very wrong in me; and then there is Monsieur Horace " and with the thought of him all Madelon's courage returned.
And behind her, too, already separated from her by a distance more impassable than that which can be counted by leagues, lies Madelon's old life, to which many and many a time, with passionate outcries, perhaps, with tender unspeakable yearnings, she will look back across an ever- widening space, only to see it recede more hopelessly into a remoter past.
She swerved not her eyes a hair's-breadth when she came close to him so close that their shoulders almost touched in passing in the narrow path. Suddenly there was a quick sigh in her ear "Oh, Madelon!" Then an arm was flung around her waist and hot lips were pressed to her own. The mixed blood of two races, in which action is quick to follow impulse, surged up to Madelon's head.
"Dix francs, et je ferai fortune dix francs, et je ferai fortune " The old words seemed to set themselves to a tune in Madelon's head, chiming in with the croupier's perpetual "Rouge gagne et la couleur," "Rouge perd et la couleur," whilst the two precious coins grew warm in the little hand that was clasped so tightly over them.
Madelon waited till that turn was over, and then, leaning across the back of the chair before her, threw one of her little gold pieces on the table. It was on the red she had staked. There was a pause as the other players made their game; Madelon's languid pulses began to flutter with a sudden interest, increasing to breathless excitement as the croupier began to deal out the cards.
Madelon had got out her red cloak and her silk hood, and it was nearly time to start when there was a knock on the door. Madelon's face was pale in a second, then red again. She pushed Richard aside. "I'll go to the door," said she. She knew somehow that it was Burr Gordon, and when she opened the door he stood there. He looked curiously embarrassed, but she did not notice that.
Suddenly all Madelon's beauty was cheapened in her own eyes. She saw herself swart and harsh-faced as some old savage squaw beside this fair angel. She turned on herself as well as on her recreant lover with rage and disdain and all the time she lilted without one break.
Madelon's own chamber, carpetless and freezing cold, with its sparse furniture and scanty sweep of white curtains across the furred windows which filled the room with the blue-white light of frost, was desolation to it. A great fire blazed on Dorothy Fair's chamber hearth. The red glow of it was over the whole room, and the frost on the windows was melting.
Before she had been a month in the convent, she knew almost as much as Nanette, had learnt why people go to church and what they do there, had studied her catechism, could find her places in her prayer-book, could repeat Ave Marias and Paternosters, and tell her beads like every one else. And so Madelon's questions are answered at last, her perplexities solved, her yearnings satisfied!
"True," said Lot; "it is the last thing a girl will forget the day set for her happy marriage." He laughed. Madelon's face contracted. She set her mouth harder, and looked straight at Lot. "When you have done laughing," said she, "will you tell me what you want of me? I have to go home and get dinner." Lot still looked at her with his mocking smile.
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