It was scarcely daylight of the ruddy but chill October morning, when the travellers set out from the station at which they had been dropped. They had been left there to wait for the diligence, which only left on the arrival of another train from Paris. All had been black and silent at the little station of Montdard, when they were shot out, to the dismay of two or three half-awakened officials, who regarded them with alarm and suspicion. It was very rarely indeed that any one arrived in the middle of the night at Montdard, except from Paris, the train from which did not come in till five o’clock. What were they to do in the meantime? Mr Goulburn had got little Janey in his arms fast asleep. With her dangling feet, and her pale little head thrown back on his shoulder, she looked more like a sick young woman, long and wasted, than a child. Helen followed closely as a shadow, asking no questions, following every indication of her father’s will, silent and watchful, cold and miserable. The gloom around and the suspicious looks of the railway men, and the cold that went to her heart, all began to be familiar. It did not even occur to her to think of the existence which had ended about ten days ago, the life of warmth and luxury and softness, which knew no disturbance, which was waited upon by assiduous servants, and spent in such careful guardianship. She thought of it no more. What she wished for was not her draped and curtained room at Fareham, with its carpets in which the feet sank, but a comfortable bench somewhere, or rush-bottomed chair in a corner out of the wind, where she could get her ulster more closely about her, and put a shawl over Janey’s feet; or, as the very climax of comfort, another white-curtained wooden room with two little beds, where she could lie down with Janey next to her. Helen in her heart had bidden farewell to Fareham for ever and ever. She did not know even where they were going; and it gave her a gleam of comfort to hear her father explain to the sleepy yet vigilant porter in his blouse, that he was going to Latour, where there was to be a sale of the woods on the property of the late Count Bernard de Vieux-bois. Mr Goulburn explained that he had heard of this only at the last moment, and that, as he had no time to lose, he had been obliged to bring his daughters with him, though the journey was so fatiguing for the little one. The French heart is very open to children, and the man with the blouse managed to open the door of a dismal _salle_, where at least _la petite_ would be sheltered from the cold wind. How kind they are to Janey! Helen thought. The rough peasant-porter with his bristly beard, a man who might have figured in a revolutionary riot, and probably had done so, one time or another, caressed a floating lock of her fair hair which fell from her father’s shoulder with his rough hand, with the softest look of reverence and pity. “_Pauvre petite!_”--he brought an old