She turned away, making a gesture to him to go back. They were opposite the Lion d’Or, where still the _conscrits_ were hanging about with their coloured ribbons, and Baptiste receiving once again perpetual congratulation. Antoine, with his hands in his pockets, strolled along in the middle of the street, biting a straw which he held in his mouth. He was looking at M. Goudron’s windows with bended brows. Amid all the peaceful surroundings, he alone caught Charley Ashton’s eyes as a sinister figure meaning mischief; but he was far too much occupied with other thoughts to waste any upon the village bully at a moment so full of heavier trouble and pain. CHAPTER XIII. Helen went home with slow steps and a heavy heart. A heavy heart, indeed; it had beaten wildly enough within the last hour--now it lay in her breast like a lump of lead. This morning, though there was nothing happy in her position--though she knew that some great cloud of misery and doubt hung between them and everything they had hitherto known, and that even the tranquillity of the moment, such as it was, might be interrupted in a second, in the twinkling of an eye,--yet the triumphant light-heartedness of youth had been able to triumph over all these things. And there had been so warm an atmosphere of life about them, so much interchange of feeling, keen sympathy, and the profound happiness of making others happy, that very little sense of being there as a stranger had remained in Helen’s mind. They were not strangers--they were more at home in Latour than they had ever been in Fareham. Here everybody knew them, everybody had a friendly word for them; more than that, the English family, with its careless, liberal ways, had now secured the affection of the village. She herself had never known before what it was to have friends like Cécile and Thérèse, or to be interested with such familiar kindness in any poor girl as she had been in the fortunes of little Blanchette. At Fareham the love of the village publican’s son with the retired tradesman’s daughter would have been nothing to the great young lady, secluded among her woods and parks. But here they were more interesting, and concerned her more than any romance. She had a share in the lives of so many people, and her own life was full of tranquil occupations, of sympathies, of friendships; every cottage round about contained something or somebody that interested her. But what of that? They must all be left behind, as all her other habits of living, all her previous existence had been. She would have to give up those first personal friends, not knowing if she should ever see them more, not hoping to do so--and go away from the homely little life which had given her her first lively sense of individual existence--for what? to go where? Helen could not tell. The world was all dark beyond this one clear spot in which the afternoon sun had just sunk behind the cottage roofs, and the whole sky overhead was