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.

“It’s such a hateful place at Mrs. Wilkinson’s,” she went on, “everybody calling me at once, and scolding me; and there are such a many people to run errands for.  You don’t know what it is to run errands when you are tired to death.  And it’s such a beautiful, splendid place where we’re going to!”

“What is your name, my dear?” I asked, sitting down on my box and taking her on my lap.  Such a thin, stunted little woman, precociously learned in trouble!  Yet she nestled in my arms like a true child, and a tear or two rolled down her cheeks, as if from very contentment.

“Nobody has nursed me like this since mother died,” she said.  “I’m Mary; but father always called me Minima, because I was the least in the house.  He kept a boys’ school out of London, in Epping Forest, you know; and it was so heavenly!  All the boys were good to me, and we used to call father Dominie.  Then he died, and mother died just before him; and he said,’Courage, Minima!  God will take care of my little girl.’  So the boys’ fathers and mothers made a subscription for me, and they got a great deal of money, a hundred pounds; and somebody told them about this school, where I can stay four years for a hundred pounds, and they all said that was the best thing they could do with me.  But I’ve had to stay with Mrs. Wilkinson nearly two months, because she could not find a governess to go with me.  I hate her; I detest her; I should like to spit at her!”