ill 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. "You can apply here to Madame for
money if the child lives; if it dies she will let me know, and
I need send no more." And so saying, he strode out of the
room, leaving the women with hands and eyes uplifted at the
hard-hearted conduct of the father.

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. But about twenty months after his wife's death, business
obliged him to go for a few weeks to Paris; and finding
himself with a leisure day on his hands, it occurred to him,
with a sudden impulse, to spend it in the country and go and
see his little girl. He ascertained from Madame Lavaux where
she was, and went.

The woman with whom little Madeleine had been placed lived
about fifteen miles from Paris, in a small village perched
half-way up a steep hill, from the foot of which stretched a
wide plain, where the Seine wound slowly amongst trees and
meadows, and scattered villages. The house to which M. Linders
was directed stood a little apart from the others, near the
road-side, but separated from it by a strip of garden, planted
with herbs and a patch of vines; and as he opened the gate, he
came at once upon a pretty little picture of a child of two
years, in a quaint, short-waisted, long-skirted pinafore,
toddling about, playing at hide-and-seek among the tall poles
and trailing tendrils, and kept within safe limits by a pair
of leading-strings passed round the arm of a woman who sat in
the shade of the doorway knitting. As M. Linders came up the
narrow pathway she ran towards him to the utmost extent of her
tether, uttering little joyous inarticulate cries, and
bubbling over with the happy instinctive laughter of a child
whose consciousness is bounded by its glad surroundings.

When, in moments of pseudo remorse, which would come upon him
from time to time, it occurred to M. Linders to reflect upon
his misdeeds, and adopt an apologetic tone concerning them, he
was wont t