braided overcoat, fine, but faded, from an inner room to lay on her feet--“It would have been better to leave her _à la maison_,” he said. _À la maison!_ People who know no better, say the French have no word that means home; but Helen felt this word go through and through her like a sword. Where was the house to which Janey belonged, where she could find her little bed and her little corner by right? As for Mr Goulburn, he put himself on the bench against the wall in the most painfully constrained attitude to make Janey comfortable. His face, as he looked down upon the child, was lighted up with the most trembling tenderness. He had wronged many people and deprived many children of bread, but he loved his own with a passionate devotion. He could not separate himself from his child. Helen, so watchful beside him, saw it all with an ache of wonder in her heart. She did not understand, perhaps, that clinging of a guilty man to the one thing innocent and sweet in his life. She was sorry for her poor little sister thus dragged about the world, and perhaps a little sorry for herself. If it was necessary for him to fly from one place to another, why should little Janey be made to fly too? And Helen turned her thoughts back upon the Lion d’Or with unspeakable regret. It was not an attractive place, but still it was shelter and safety. What thoughts were going on in her father’s mind, who could say? There were other places of refuge which would have been safer than France, but he had little time to choose. It was not much more than chance which had determined the route they took in leaving England, and he had remembered Sainte-Barbe as the most unfrequented place he had ever seen. But the village which he had chosen must surely be out of the world if ever village was. Among the hills of Burgundy, above the vineyards, beyond the reach of commerce, in the country where the old Gauls fought, and where even the Prussians had not penetrated--what could be more safe? and yet who could guarantee its safety? “We should have been better in Spain,” he was saying to himself.