All the preparations were completed; the farmer's wife had her horse hitched to the wagon, in which she took her place beside Sister Anne, who held her son in her lap. They started early in the morning, and arrived at Lyon the same evening. The farmer's wife engaged a seat for the young mother in the diligence which was to start for Paris the next day, and recommended her to the conductor, so that he would keep an eye on her during the journey. The hour for their departure arrived: not without abundant tears did the kind-hearted peasant part from the dumb girl and little Frédéric. "You would leave us, my child," she said; "I'm very much afraid you're making a mistake. You're going to an enormous city. People there won't be so much interested in you as the folks in our village are. But don't forget us. Send us word how you're getting along, through Monsieur de Montreville, who seems to be very fond of you; and if the time should ever come when you're miserable and unhappy, why, come right back to us; you'll always be as welcome as a child of our own." Sister Anne kissed the good woman affectionately; then, with her son in her arms, she entered the carriage that was to take her to Paris. XXVII THE DILIGENCE.--SISTER ANNE IN PARIS A young woman who has never been away from her cabin in the woods until she is sixteen years of age, whose condition makes her peculiarly unfamiliar with the world and its customs, must experience countless novel sensations when she finds herself for the first time surrounded by strangers in one of those rolling houses that bear us through city and country. Such was the case with Sister Anne, who was not eighteen and a half when she left Lyon for Paris with her little son of twenty-one months. Seated in the inmost corner of the conveyance, with her child on her knees, she dared not look at her fellow travellers, and blushed when she saw that they were scrutinizing her.