Janey ran by her father’s side, clinging to his finger, and chattering all the way. “What are they saying, papa? They speak so funny. Why don’t they speak English? Couldn’t they speak English if they liked?” Mr Goulburn was a man who liked to be popular. He was of the class which servants declare to be “not the least proud.” “My little girl thinks you could speak English if you liked,” he said, turning to Antoine, the most noted poacher in the district. “Ah! je voudrais bien! I should then have the pleasure of talking to these demoiselles,” the man said, taking off his hat. “I don’t like him,” said little Janey. “He has a big cut on his head; he has eyes like the ogre in ‘Jack the Giant-killer.’ What does he want with you, papa? He will take you into a cave, and he will eat you up. I like the other one best.” The other was Baptiste, who was the son of the landlady at the Lion d’Or. It was he who advised the Côte du Midi. He knew all the coverts as well as the partridges did, or the old wolf that lurked in the darkest shades of the forest. And his woodland likings had brought him woe; but he was bent upon defending _l’Anglais_, who was his private property for the moment, his mother’s lodger, from the clutches of Antoine. When they came as far as the _château_, Janey consented to give up her father’s finger, and to withdraw from the procession of the wood merchants. The _château_ was not one of those deserted grey houses they had passed on their way from Montdard, but a fine medieval building, surrounded by a moat, and modernised under Louis Quatorze. It occupied three sides of a square, and at the end nearest the village was distinguished by a noble tower, covered with a pointed roof, from the windows of which the lights always shone at night, like a sort of lighthouse to the village. Helen stopped to look at it with a little quickening of natural interest. There was nothing about it of the luxury of the English home. It stood close to the road, no privacy of exquisite lawns or wealthy foliage withdrawing it from the humblest of its neighbours, a poor little plot of shrubs occupying the centre of the square within the gravelled drive. The long row of large white windows, very close to each other, which ran round two sides of the square, were undraped and unornamented, not a curtain, not a piece of furniture, showing from the outside. The great door underneath them stood open, and showed only a narrow corridor, and a bare stone staircase, mounting between two white walls. Helen stood and looked at it wistfully. She scarcely seemed to remember her own past life--it was a life which had no sort of connection with the cottages of Latour, the women in their white caps, the strange existence of the Lion d’Or; but here there was a kind of link of connection. If there were girls in the _château_, theirs might be a French version of her old life. They would be in the neighbourhood, in the village, something like what she had been. If they