As she walked along and the day broke, her heart failed her; she could neither hasten her steps, nor speak, and when she came to the highroad, she sat down on the side of a ditch, more dead than alive. The stage-coach was approaching, and they had arrived only just in time. The waif was not in the habit of worrying, and thus far he had followed his mother without suspicion; but when he saw a huge carriage bowling toward him for the first time in his life, the noise it made frightened him, and he tried to pull Zabelle back into the meadow which they had just left to join the highroad. Zabelle thought that he understood his fate, and said: "Come, poor François, you really must!" François was still more frightened. He thought that the stage-coach was an enormous animal running after him to devour him. He who was so bold in meeting all the dangers which he knew lost his head, and rushed back screaming into the meadow. Zabelle ran after him; but when she saw him pale as death, her courage deserted her. She followed him all across the meadow, and allowed the stage-coach to go by. [Illustration] CHAPTER III THEY returned by the same road they had come, until they had gone half the distance, and then they stopped to rest. Zabelle was alarmed to see that the child trembled from head to foot, and his heart beat so violently as to agitate his poor old shirt. She made him sit down, and attempted to comfort him, but she did not know what she was saying, and François was not in a state to guess her meaning. She drew out a bit of bread from her basket and tried to persuade him to eat it; but he had no desire for food, and they sat on for a long time in silence. At last, Zabelle, who was in the habit of recurring to her first thoughts, was ashamed of her weakness, and said to herself that she would be lost if she appeared again at the mill with the child. Another stage was to pass toward noon, and she decided to stay where they were until the moment necessary for returning to the highroad; but as François was so terrified that he had lost the little sense he possessed, and as for the first time in his life he was capable of resisting her will, she tried to tempt him with the attractions of the horse's bells, the noise of the wheels, and the speed of the great vehicle. In her efforts to inspire him with confidence, she said more than she intended; perhaps her repentance urged her to speak, in spite of herself, or it may be that when François woke that morning he had heard certain words of Mother Blanchet, which now returned to his mind; or else his poor wits cleared suddenly at the approach of calamity; at all events, he began to say, with the same expression in his eyes which had once astonished and almost startled Madeleine: "Mother, you want to send me away from you! You want to take me far off from here and leave me."