The coach went on through the lonely land, past one small town, Montmirail, which later Napoleon’s resistance was to render famous, and on again into the empty fields, still eastward. It grew to be noon, hot and almost stormy under the lowering sky. Louis the King, with his road-book spread upon his knee, followed with curiously detached interest the correspondence of the map with the dull landscape outside. As the carriage stopped at one posting-house after another, and as he would plunge his hand into his leather money-bag to give his guardsman the wages of the postillions, he was not content thus to show his face at the window, he would even stretch his legs a bit and get down from the carriage to pace to and fro while each fresh team was harnessing. “We are safe now,” he said; and again, “There is no fear of our being recognized now.” All the air of that little company had come to be one of security, though one man had already marked them down, and already the galloping out in pursuit from the gates of Paris had begun. The governess and the royal children caught that air of security, and where a long hill put the horses at a walk, they got out and climbed it on foot. There was only one small incident of which to this day we cannot tell whether it was of any moment or no. The little princess had noted it and had been disturbed. It was the presence of a traveller who for a time rode alone upon his horse behind them, walking when they walked, trotting when they trotted. It may have been no more than a coincidence that his way lay with theirs. Long before Châlons he had turned off by a by-road and disappeared. There is, making a sort of western wall for the Champagne country, a very sharp and even range of hills running north and south. These are the escarpment of that plateau of which I have just spoken, and over which for many hours the coach had been travelling on. These hills end abruptly to the south, but just beyond the precipitous slope in which they terminate there stands across a narrow, clean-cut valley one isolated height called the Mont Aimé; so that the gap is a sort of gate into the flat country below, which stretches eastward in a wide, rolling, chalky plain, the lower Champagne, of which Châlons is the capital and centre. Beyond that plain, eastward and very far away, another low, level line of hills, the Forest of the Argonne, marks the very distant horizon. Through this gate, which is a landmark for miles throughout the plain, passes the road; and half an hour beyond, or a little more, where the road crosses the small water of the Soude, three or four houses round one posting-house, by name Chaintrix, break the monotony of the fields. The travellers reached it just in the sultriest part of the day. They had not greatly added to their error in time; they were not much, if at all, behind the hour and a half of debt against fate which they had already suffered to accumulate, when fate