The diligence started at five o’clock for Latour. It was speedily filled, in the little interior, with five or six young peasant-women in their white caps, each with a baby, little foundlings, or the children of poor shopkeepers and workpeople in Paris, brought to the country to be reared--the healthy hills of _la Haute Bourgogne_ being much approved for that purpose. The travellers managed with great difficulty to get possession for themselves of the _banquette_, a covered seat like a sort of phaeton, with leathern curtains capable of closing in front, which occupies the place behind the coachman in these rural vehicles. They had ten long leagues to traverse before they got to their journey’s end. Poor little Janey, very pale and shivering, lost for the first time her childish adaptability, and whimpered pitifully, with cold feet, and the wretchedness of her disturbed rest; and a more melancholy and jaded party never confronted the morning mists. They rattled along as in a dream, seeing the country gradually unfold itself, now just visible in the faint grey of the dawn, anon developing into clearer light, the hills rising black against the yellow east, then showing their grass slopes and broken bits of cliff as the sun struck here and there a long golden dart driving away the shadows. A crisp sprinkling of hoarfrost was upon the fields, and the roads were hard, and resounded under the horses’ feet, which made sound enough, with all the jingling of the rude harness, and all the creaking of the springless coach, for a whole cavalcade. In front of the _banquette_, beside the coachman, sat a large priest and a man wrapped in the thick blue overcoat with its braided collar which the French peasant loves. The talk of these two was all of the old Count de Vieux-bois’s woods. The hills between which the road passed were entirely bare of trees, and Count Bernard had been the subject of much pleasantry, the priest said, when he planted his lands with an unprofitable crop of forest. But time had proved Count Bernard to be right. These voices went on dreamily in Helen’s ear, making a sort of drowsy song to the accompaniment of the wheels and the horses’ hoofs. But Mr Goulburn listened closely to all the heavy talk. The impulse of trade was strong in him, and the idea of turning over money now in his present downfall and fugitive condition roused him. He had seized upon the pretext, catching it up at the moment of necessity from an advertisement in one of the papers, to give an excuse for his hurried journey. But the idea pleased him the more he dwelt upon it. He listened with the greatest attention to all that was being said; he recovered the activity and energy of mind that was natural to him. To outwit fate in such a way would be in itself a kind of triumph. He did not disturb little Janey’s head, which lay on his shoulder, but he withdrew his arm from her as his thoughts quickened. A man of business is always a man of