Madeline.
    The intercourse of the Sister Madeline with the Lady Abbess was free and
unreserved. At all hours they entered each other's rooms with the familiarity of
sisters; and it might have been thought that in every respect they stood upon
the equal footing of near relatives, except that occasionally in the manners of
the Abbess was traced or imagined a secret air of deference towards the desolate
Sister Madeline, which, as it was not countenanced at all by their present
relations to each other, left people at liberty to build upon it a large
superstructure of romantic conjectures.
    Sister Madeline was as regular in her attendance upon prayers as Paulina.
There, if nowhere else, they were sure of meeting; and in no long time it became
evident that the younger lady was an object of particular interest to the elder.
When the sublime fugues of the old composers for the organ swelled upon the air,
and filled the vast aisles of the chapel with their floating labyrinths of
sound, attention to the offices of the church service being suspended for the
time, the Sister Madeline spent the interval in watching the countenance of
Paulina. Invariably at this period her eyes settled upon the young Countess, and
appeared to court some return of attention, by the tender sympathy which her own
features expressed with the grief too legibly inscribed upon Paulina's. For some
time Paulina, absorbed by her own thoughts, failed to notice this very
particular expression of attention and interest. Accustomed to the gaze of
crowds, as well on account of her beauty as her connexion with the Imperial
house, she found nothing new or distressing in this attention to herself. After
some time, however, observing herself still haunted by the sister's furtive
glances, she found her own curiosity somewhat awakened in return. The manners of
Sister Madeline were too dignified, and her face expressed too much of profound
feeling, and traces too inextinguishable of the trials through which she had
passed, to allow room for any belief that she was under the influence of an
ordinary curiosity. Paulina was struck with a confused feeling, - that she
looked upon features which had already been familiar to her heart, though
disguised in Sister Madeline by age, by sex, and by the ravages of grief; she
had the appearance of having passed her fiftieth year; but it was probable that,
spite of a brilliant complexion, secret sorrow had worked a natural effect in
giving to her the appearance of age more advanced by seven or eight years than
she had really attained. Time, at all events, if it had carried off for ever her
youthful graces, neither had