I turned away baffled and discouraged; but my new friend was not so quickly depressed.  It was impossible, he maintained, that the English girl and the child could have left the town unnoticed.  He went with me to all the omnibus bureaus, where we made urgent inquiries concerning the passengers who had quitted Noireau during the last month.  No places had been taken for Miss Ellen Martineau and the child, for there was no such name in any of the books.  But at each bureau I was recommended to see the drivers upon their return in the evening; and I was compelled to give up the pursuit for that day.

CHAPTER THE FORTY-THIRD.

A SECOND PURSUER.

No wonder there was fever in the town, I thought, as I picked my way among the heaps of garbage and refuse lying out in the streets.  The most hideous old women I ever saw, wrinkled over every inch of their skin, blear-eyed, and with eyelids reddened by smoke, met me at each turn.  Sallow weavers, in white caps, gazed out at me from their looms in almost every house.  There was scarcely a child to be seen about.  The whole district, undrained and unhealthy, bears the name of the “Manufactory of Little Angels,” from the number of children who die there.  And this was the place where Olivia had been spending a very hard and severe winter!

There was going to be a large cattle-fair the next day, and all the town was alive.  Every inn in the place was crowded to overflowing.  As I sat at the window of my cafe, watching the picturesque groups which formed in the street outside, I heard a vehement altercation going on in the archway, under which was the entrance to my hotel.

“Grands Dieux!” cried the already familiar voice of my landlady, shrill as the cackling of a hen—­“grands Dieux! not a single soul from Ville-en-bois can rest here, neither man nor woman!  They have the fever like a pest there.  No, no, m’sieur, that is impossible; go away, you and your beast.  There is room at the Lion d’or.  But the gensdarmes should not let you enter the town.  We have fever enough of our own.”

“But my farm is a league from Ville-en-bois,” was the answer, in the slow, rugged accents of a Norman peasant.

“But I tell you it is impossible,’” she retorted; “I have an Englishman here, very rich, a milor, and he will not hear of any person from Ville-en-bois resting in the house.  Go away to the Lion d’or, my good friend, where there are no English.  They are as afraid of the fever as of the devil.”

I laughed to myself at my landlady’s ingenious excuses; but after this the conversation fell into a lower key, and I heard no more of it.