“Papa thinks so _too_,” Helen said to herself, as she went into the room where Janey was sleeping. It had all been very sudden, and she did not understand it; but there was a wonderful difference. “It is because there are two of us--not one standing alone.” Were there ever words that meant so much? And papa thought so _too_. CHAPTER XIV. “Harford? No, I don’t know anybody of the name,” Sir John had said; but while Charley was out after dinner, exercising that inalienable privilege of an Englishman to do absurd things, which everybody recognises in France, he heard a great deal about the English family in the village, which made him think. Helen was said to have spoken of Fareham, which Sir John knew very well; and Ashton had recognised this mysterious English girl, whose presence here was so unaccountable. And there was a father in bad health--and a child. What could such people want at Latour? “You shall see her at dinner,” Cécile said; but she did not come to dinner, and Sir John, who had frowned at the prospect of a dinner-party, as he chose to call it, on the first night of his arrival, frowned still more when Helen’s apologies were made, with great earnestness and regrets far more eloquent than anything Helen would have thought of expressing, by the wife of the Précepteur. If she was to come, why didn’t she come? What was the meaning of it? Could it be some entanglement of Charley’s? his cousin thought. “Had they anything to do with Fareham?” he asked late that night, when Charley had come in, glowing and radiant, from his night walk. “I don’t understand about these English people in the village. Where did you meet them? who are they? I don’t want any equivocal people here, in Cécile’s very village. What could they have to do with Fareham? I never heard the name there.” “I met them somewhere in the parish,” said Charley, evasively. “I forget exactly in which house. You don’t know all the people in Fareham parish. I believe it was at a school-feast----” Of how much service that school-feast had been! Sir John was more satisfied, but uncertain still. “The father is ill,” he said. “So the Comtesse said,” said Charley, with caution. He was too much on his guard to commit himself. “A strange place for a sick man--not a doctor, except the parish doctor, within thirty miles. What, in the name of wonder, could have brought them to Latour?” “I suppose,” said Charley, “it is a very cheap place.” “Cheap? There is something in that,” said Sir John. Then he paused, and fixing his eyes upon his cousin, “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I shouldn’t wonder a bit if it was another victim of that scoundrel Goulburn,--some poor wretch who has lost every penny, who has dragged himself here, to die perhaps. Don’t you think it would be civil to go and see him, as he is ill? They take no end of interest in him here.”