her usual
vivacity, sitting absorbed in dreamy fits, from which it was
difficult to arouse her, and which were very different from
the quiet, happy silence in which she used to remain contented
by her father's side for hours. All night she was haunted with
what she had seen by day in picture-galleries and churches.
The heavenly creations of Fra Angelico or Sandro Botticelli,
of Ghirlandaio or Raffaelle, over which she had mused and
pondered, re-produced themselves in dreams, with the intensity
and reality of actual visions, and with accessories borrowed
from all that, in her new life, had impressed itself most
vividly on her imagination. Once more she would stand in the
vast church, the censers swinging, the organ pealing overhead,
round her a great throng of beatified adoring saints, with
golden glories, with palms, and tall white lilies, and many-
coloured garments; or pillars and arches would melt away, and
she would find herself wandering through flower-enamelled
grass, in fair rose-gardens of Paradise; or radiant forms
would come gliding towards her through dark-blue skies; or the
heavens themselves would seem to open, and reveal a blaze of
glory, where, round a blue-robed, star-crowned Madonna, choirs
of rapturous angels repeated the divine melodies she had heard
faintly echoed in the violinist's dim little room. All day
long these dreams clung to her, oppressing her with their
strange unreal semblance of reality, associating themselves
with every glowing sunset, with every starry sky, till the
pictures themselves that had suggested them looked pale by
comparison.

She was, in fact, going through a mental crisis, such as, in
other circumstances, and under fostering influences, has
produced more than one small ecstatic enthusiast; the infant
shining light of some Methodist conventicle; the saintly child
visionary of some Catholic convent. But Madelon had no one to
foster, nor to interpret for her these feverish visions, so
inexplicable to herself, poor child! To the good-natured,
careless, jovial American, she would not have even hinted at
them for worlds, and not less carefully did she shun appealing
to her father for sympathy. That contemptuous "_vraiment_" dwelt
in her memory, not as a matter of resentment, but as something
to be avoided henceforth at the cost of any amount of self-
repression. She would sit leaning her languid little head on
his shoulder; but when he anxiously asked her what ailed her,
s