Caroline, noticing the deep silence which followed upon the noise of the wheels, ventured resolutely into the narrow and almost perpendicular street which was supposed to continue the highway. Here her knowledge of the place came to a sudden stop. Justine had never described the position of her house. The traveller, wishing to glide in quietly and arrange with the family to keep her incognito, resolved to avoid knocking anywhere or waking any one, and to wait for day, which could not be long in dawning. She laid her bundle down beside her on a wooden bench, and took her seat under the pent-house of the first cottage she came to. She gazed at the queer fantastic picture made by the roofs, brought into uneven and hard relief against the white clouds of the sky. The moon passed into the narrow zone left open between the neighboring pent-houses. The basin of a little fountain caught the clear moonlight in full, and a quarter of its circle sparkled under the fall of a slender spray of water from the rock. The peaceful aspect and continuous measured sound of this silvery water soon lulled our exhausted traveller to sleep. "Here is certainly a change within three days," said she to herself, placing her bundle so as to make it a rest for her weary head. "Only last Thursday, nevertheless, Mlle de Saint-Geneix, in a dress of tulle, her neck and arms loaded with rare pearls, and her hair full of camellias, was dancing with the Marquis de Villemer, under the light of countless tapers, in one of the richest of Parisian drawing-rooms. What would M. de Villemer say now if he could see this pretended queen of the ball-room, wrapped in coarse woollen, lying at the door of a shed, her feet almost in the flowing water and her hands stiff with the cold? Happily the moon is beautiful,--and here it is striking two o'clock! Well, there is an hour more to be spent here, and since sleep will come whether or no, why, then, let it be welcome." XXI At daybreak Mlle de Saint-Geneix was awakened by the hens clucking and scratching around her. She rose and walked on, looking at the doors of the houses as they opened one by one, and saying to herself with reason that in a hamlet so small and stowed so close among the rocks, she could not stray far without finding the face she sought. But here a difficulty presented itself. Was she sure of recognizing this nurse, whom she had never seen since she was ten years old? She had Justine's voice and accent in her memory far more clearly than her face. She followed the ups and downs of the road as far as the last house behind the rock, and there she saw written on the door "Peyraque Lanion." A horseshoe nailed over this sign indicated his occupation of farrier.