Madeleine's rooms--by her stepmother's grace she had two, a sitting-room and a bedroom--are upstairs. Small rooms, but very pretty, and arranged with all the simple taste of a well-bred, right-thinking girl. Her hanging book-shelves are well filled with their row of poets, their row of "useful" works, their _Thomas à Kempis_, their Longfellow's _Hyperion_, their _Pilgrim's Progress_, their _Scenes of Clerical Life_--with all the Amos Barton bits dreadfully underscored--their _Christmas Carol_, and their _Esmond_. The neat little writing-table, with its gilt mortar inkstand, and its pretty costly nicknacks--birthday presents from her fond father--stood in the window; and above it hung the cage of her pet canary. There were but few pictures on the walls: a water-colour drawing of Kilsyth, bad enough, with impossible perspective, and a very coppery sunset over very spotty blue hills, but dear to the girl as the work of the mother whom she had scarcely known; a portrait of her father in his youth, showing how gently time had dealt with the brave old boy; a print from Grant's portrait of Lady Muriel; and a photograph of Ronald in his uniform, looking very grim and stern and Puritan-like. There is a small cottage-piano too, and a well-filled music-stand,--well-filled, that is to say, according to its owner's ideas, but calculated to fill the souls of musical enthusiasts with horror or pity; for there is very little of the severe and the classical about Madeleine even in her musical tastes: Gluck's _Orfeo_, some of Mendelssohn's _Lieder ohne Worte_, and a few selections from Mozart, quite satisfied her; and the rest of the music-stand was filled with Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi, English ballads, and even dance music. Upon all the room was the impress and evidence of womanly taste and neatness; nothing was prim, but everything was properly arranged; above all, neither in books, pictures, music, nor on the dressing-table or in the wardrobe in the bedroom, was there the smallest sign of fastness or slanginess, that almost omnipresent drawback to the charms of the young ladies of the present day.