den name. As far as I recollected, I had
never spoken of her to him. Moreover he was not a man to make himself at
all pleasant and familiar with persons whom he looked upon as inferiors.
It was highly improbable that he would enter into any conversation with
his landlady. If that woman did so, all she would learn would be that a
young lady, whose name was Martineau, had taken a situation as English
teacher in a French school. What could there be in that to make her
think of me?

I tried to soothe and reassure myself with these reasonings, but I could
not be quiet or at peace. I watched all through the next day, listening
to every sound in the house below; but no new terror assailed me. The
second night I was tranquil enough to sleep.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

LEAVING ENGLAND.

I was on the rack all the next day. It was the last day I should be in
England, and I had a nervous dread of being detained. If I should once
more succeed in quitting the country undetected, it seemed as though I
might hope to be in safety in Calvados. Of Calvados I knew even less
than of the Channel Islands; I had never heard the name before. But Mrs.
Wilkinson had given me the route by which we were to reach Noireau: by
steamer to Havre, across the mouth of the Seine to Honfleur, to Falaise
by train, and finally from Falaise to Noireau by omnibus. It was an
utterly unknown region to me; and I had no reason to imagine that
Richard Foster was better acquainted with it than I. My anxiety was
simply to get clear away.

In the afternoon the little girl arrived quite alone, except that a man
had been hired to carry a small box for her, and to deliver her into my
charge. This was a great relief to me, and I paid the shilling he
demanded gladly. The child was thinly and shabbily dressed for our long
journey, and there was a forlorn loneliness about her position, left
thus with a stranger, which touched me to the heart. We were alike poor,
helpless, friendless--I was about to say childish, and in truth I was in
many things little more than a child still. The small elf, with her
sharp, large eyes, which were too big for her thin face, crept up to
me, as the man slammed the door after him and clattered noisily
downstairs.

"I'm so glad!" she said, with a deep-drawn sigh of relief; "I was afraid
I should never go, and school is such a heavenly place!"

The words amused yet troubled me; they were so different from a child's
ordinary opinion.

"