Yet, heat notwithstanding, the great bare road that runs from Calais through Boulogne, Abbeville, and Amiens, as well as through Clermont and Chantilly and St. Denis to Paris, had still its continuous traffic to which neither summer nor winter made much difference, except when the snows of the latter belated many diligences and waggons--for it was the high road between the coast and the capital. And thus it was now, in this hot, broiling June of 1746. Along that road, passing each other sometimes, sometimes breaking down, sometimes, by the carelessness of drunken drivers or postillions, getting their wheels into ditches and sticking there for hours, went almost every vehicle that was known in the France of those days. Monseigneur's carriage, drawn by four or six stout travelling roadsters--wrenched for the occasion from the service of Monseigneur's starving tenants--and with Monseigneur within it looking ineffably bored at the heat and the dust and the inferior _canaille_ who obtruded themselves on his vision--would lumber by the diligence, or Royal Post, farmed from Louis the well-beloved--so, loved, perhaps, because he despised his people and said France would last his time, which was long enough!--or be passed by a _desobligéant_, or chaise for one person, or by a fat priest on a post-horse, or by a travelling carriage full of provincials _en route_ for Paris. Also, to add to the continuous traffic on this road in that period, were _berlins à quatre chevaux_, carriers' waggons loaded with merchandise either from or to England, countless horsemen civil and military, and innumerable pedestrians, since the accomplishment of long journeys on foot, with a wallet slung on the back, was then one of the most ordinary methods of travelling amongst the humbler classes. Seated in the _banquette_, or hooded seat, attached to the back of the diligence from Calais to Amiens, on one of these broiling days in June of 1746, were Kate Fane--as now she alone would describe herself or allow herself to be styled--and her father. They had crossed from England in the ordinary packet-boat a day or two before, and were at this moment between Abbeville and Amiens, at which latter place they proposed to remain for the present at least. To look at her none would have supposed that, not more than a week or two before, this golden-haired girl, now dressed in a plain-checked chintz, with, to protect her head from the heat, a large flapping straw hat, had been discarded by the man whom she had imagined to be her husband; had been told that she was, possibly, no lawful wife. For she looked happier, brighter at this time than she had ever done since she went through a form of marriage with the Viscount Fordingbridge, because--though not in the way that he had falsely insinuated--she was free of him.