“Now just you listen to me, citizeness, and you young people. You’ve got yourselves to think about and you’re not going to help the young brats who’ve run away by getting your heads snapped off by the guillotine, which,” he went on, speaking impressively and with something of a relish, “is what is happening to most of your acquaintances, and serves them right, too, some of them. Now, maybe the two I picked up were the parties you’re talking about. The boy certainly did look a great deal like the woman you went to say good-by to at the cottage. A fine woman,” he went on meditatively, “a good, honest, sensible woman. Well, I’ll tell you what I think, and you needn’t have any fits about it. I think them two parties is just as lively to-day as you are yourselves. I think they’re in Paris, and I’ll get word to the shepherd about them, too!” After he had delivered this long speech, the driver picked up his whip to go on when the governess spoke again. “Above everything we must find the little girl and boy, you know,” she said, holding her odd striped shawl drawn tightly about her shoulders. Her face looked wan and pinched under her dark bonnet. “Above everything, citizeness, you ought to want to save the necks of these children even though you may not care a fig about your own,” Champar replied. Then he began to sing a gruff doggerel, drowning entirely Madame le Pont’s fervent reply. Toward dawn they slept for a few hours. In the morning they stopped under a blooming apple tree and ate some food. Champar seemed pleased with the progress they were making and condescended to sing them a song or two. People passed by in farmer carts and waved a greeting. No one thought it at all strange to see a farmer’s family having a picnic under an apple tree. They were off again, their coach making a cloud of dust behind them. All that day Champar and Grigge talked earnestly together, ignoring Bertran who sat beside them, and whom Grigge snubbed at every occasion. It was decided that they were to stay in a barn, back of a small farmhouse, which had met with a fire the year before, and which belonged to an uncle of Champar’s. The coach driver would leave food with them on his way back from Calais, and would report to Dian as to their whereabouts. That was all that he could do, and it was a risk at any cost, though the barn was in a lonely bit of country near the sea, and quite the other way from the main road to Calais. It was midnight before they saw the lights of Calais and the first grey outline of the sea. Champar knew his way well for he had often visited his uncle. Sure enough there was the barn, grey, and deserted by everything but rats! Champar and Grigge and Bertran carried in the rugs and blankets and enough food to last overnight. Then Grigge turned to them all. “There is a mission I have to do. I will come again,” he said.