"Ah, I shall soon be well now!" cried Madelon, joyfully. The colour came into her pale cheeks, her eyes shone with a new light. Mists, and rain, and darkness seemed to have fled from her life, and in their place a full tide of summer sunshine, in which the birds sang gladly, and the flowers seemed to spring up and open unconsciously, was crowning and glorifying the day. That she had nothing to do but to get well, was not at all Madelon's idea, however. A few evenings later, as she lay awake in her bed, watching Jeanne-Marie moving about in the twilight, arranging things for the night, she said,-- "Jeanne-Marie, I want to earn some money." "Some money, little one! What is that for?" "Ah, that I cannot tell you; but I want some, very much--thirty francs at least. See here, I have been thinking--I can embroider--Soeur Lucie said I could do it almost as well as she could; do you think you could get me some to do? Ah, please help me. I should like to earn some money." Two days afterwards, Jeanne-Marie produced two strips of cloth, such as are used for purposes of church decoration, with patterns and materials for embroidery. "Is that the sort of thing?" she said. "If you could do these, you would get thirty francs for them, I daresay; I will see that they are disposed of." "I will try," said Madelon. "Jeanne-Marie, how good you are to me!--whatever I want, you do for me!" "That is nothing," said the woman, and went abruptly away to attend to her customers. So, all the long summer days, Madelon sat through hot noontides in the shady garden below, through golden sunsets at the open window of her room above, stitching with silks and gold and silver thread, till her weak little fingers ached, and the task seemed as if it would never be done. Down in the homely neglected little garden, all a sweet tangle of flowers and weeds, she would seat herself; the birds would twitter overhead, the bees would come humming round her amongst the unpruned vines and roses that clambered everywhere, while the embroidery pattern slowly grew beneath her fingers. She worked steadily and well, but she could not work very fast; and she wearied, oh! how she wearied of it sometimes; but she never wavered in her purpose. "It is for Monsieur Horace," she would say, and begin again with fresh zeal. Through the open window of the little kitchen, which looked upon the garden, she could see Jeanne-Marie coming and going, chopping herbs, shelling peas and beans; and sometimes, when Madelon was too tired of her work, she would gladly throw it down, that she might help in these employments. "May I make an omelette, Jeanne-Marie?" she would say; "I know how to do it, if you will let me try." And the sight of Madelon flitting about the kitchen, busy among the pots and pans, seemed to stir some long-forgotten emotion in Jeanne-Marie's sad heart--too long-forgotten to be learnt anew without pain, for her eyes would fill with tears as she watched her.