"I always am good," said Madelon, firing up, and speaking from
the experience of former days, "and I am not at all happy--I
never shall be here."

But alas! it was proved too clearly that she was not at all
good, and indeed she began to think so herself, only she did
not see how she could help it.

Madelon got into great disgrace in the very first weeks after
her arrival at the convent, and this was the occasion of it.
The only room vacant for her was a cell that had been occupied
by a sister who had died a short time previously, a sister of
a devout turn of mind, who had assisted her meditations by the
contemplation of a skull of unusual size and shininess. The
cell was a cheerful, narrow little room, looking out on the
convent garden, and the first pleasant sensation that Madelon
knew in the convent was when she was taken into it, and saw
the afternoon sun shining upon its white-washed walls, and the
late climbing roses nodding in at the open window; but she
became possessed with a perfect horror of the skull. She
discovered it the first evening when she was going to bed, and
was quite glad to pop her head under the bed-clothes, to shut
out all sight and thought of it. But awaking again that first
night in her grief and loneliness, she saw a stray moonbeam
shining in, and lighting it up into ghastly whiteness and
distinctness, as it stood on a little bracket against the wall
beneath a tall wooden crucifix. For the first minute she was
half paralysed with terror; she lay staring at it without
power to move, and then she would assuredly have run to some
one for protection had she known to whom to go, or, indeed,
had she not been too terrified to do more than hide her head
under the counterpane again. From that time it became a
perpetual nightmare to her. By day its terrors were less
apparent, though even then, with her innate love for all
things bright, and joyous, and pleasant, it was a positive
grief to her to have such a grim object before her eyes
whenever she came into the room; but at night no sooner was
she in bed, and the light taken away, than her imagination
conjured up a hundred frightful shapes, that all associated
themselves with the grinning death's-head. In vain she covered
it up, in vain she shut her eyes--sleeping or waking it seemed
always there. At length she could bear it no longer, and
entreated piteously that it might be taken away; but Soeur
Lucie, to whom the little prayer was made, did