And so they did. In France all the great trains go by night; there was one very late which called at Sainte-Barbe, on the way to Paris. The clatter and clang of the omnibus which met this train disturbed the whole town at midnight so much, that M. le Maire had set every kind of machinery in motion to have it discontinued; but as the convenience of the two extremities of the railway, Marseilles and Paris, forbade this, the authorities paid no attention to the protest of Sainte-Barbe. The few guests in the Lion d’Or felt a double grievance this night, in that the omnibus, after making its usual noisy circuit from the stables, waited, pawing and champing for five minutes, under the _porte cochère_, having baggage placed upon it, and carrying away travellers at that hour. Who could they be? Oh, _les Anglais_: that went without saying. Certainly _les Anglais_; they were the sort of people who would do such a thing simply because it was unlike the rest of the world--though it was the action of a fiend, the landlady exclaimed afterwards, to take such an infant from her rest at such an hour. Young Ashton was still astir, smoking his cigar out of the window with a quite unnecessary regard for the feelings of his hosts, when the omnibus turned out of the great doorway. He thought he saw a pale face look up at his window in the uncertain glimmer of the moon, which was dim with flying clouds, and he let his cigar drop on the head of an ostler below in consternation. Could it be that they had gone away? “Gone away, because I am here!” this young man said to himself. But it seemed a thing too impossible to be true. CHAPTER V.