So Champar told them. At noon they would meet the cart that had taken their mother out of Paris. It would be waiting for them at a farmhouse he knew well. It had had a day’s start and was lightly loaded and there had been no reason for making détours as their mother’s passport was en règle and no one would suspect Henri Berier’s sister of being an aristocrat! They would see their mother by noon that day! Marie Josephine and Rosanne jumped out at the next hill and walked up it together. Toward the top they were joined by Lisle. Marie Josephine picked a bunch of wild lilies, putting them in the buttonhole of her jacket. Jean was on the box talking to Champar as on that night that Champar had given the two runaways a lift. Now and then the driver put his hands over his ears as Jean plied him with questions. “It’s been so wonderful! Sometimes it seems like a terrible, interesting dream—but we won’t see Dian after we go to England.” Marie Josephine turned her face away from the others toward a sweep of golden wild lilies which gleamed like flakes of racing sunshine through the wood on their right. She did not want them to see her tears. They fell unseen on the lilies she had gathered. “Maman! Maman! Maman!” The next moment she was screaming in an agony of joy, all her acting forgotten, all her poise and self-control lost. The coach had stopped by a lane which led from a farmhouse, and there stood a dark-eyed, slovenly woman in a faded homespun dress—her maman! Lisle and Marie Josephine sat on each side of the comtesse inside the coach, Jean and Dian sat on the wide seat in front with Champar, who was so ashamed of the tear that splashed over his big nose that he swore under his breath and was cross to the horses. Maman could only hold Marie Josephine in her arms; nothing seemed to matter except that and the touch of Lisle’s hand on hers. “My little dear one, my pigeon, my chérie,” she murmured over and over to Marie Josephine, holding her close to her fast-beating heart. “Darling, you came! It was you, my own little baby. I said there was something—do you remember, chérie, how I told you, there by the garden door, that there was something about you that reminded me of—of——?” Maman’s head went down over Marie Josephine’s shock of tangled locks, and she sobbed for a moment. Then she became more like her quiet, self-contained self. It all seemed a dream, the sweet afternoon air, the haze of heat, the scent of the field lilies and early poppies. It was all a dream to Marie Josephine, for she was very tired, but she felt her mother’s arms about her and heard her mother’s endearing words, which sounded sweeter than any she had ever heard before. They had always been there, locked deep in the comtesse’s heart, but she had never known how much she wanted to say them until it was, as she had thought, too late.