“I’m so hungry!” said Minima, after a very long silence.

I too had been hungry for an hour or two past.  We had breakfasted at mid-day at one of the stations, but we had had nothing to eat since, except a roll which Minima had brought away from breakfast, with wise prevision; but this had disappeared long ago.

“Try to go to sleep,” I said; “lean against me.  We must be there soon.”

“Yes,” she answered, “and it’s such a splendid school!  I’m going to stay there four years, you know, so it’s foolish to mind being hungry now.  ‘Courage, Minima!’ I must recollect that.”

“Courage, Olivia!” I repeated to myself.  “The farther you go, the more secure will be your hiding-place.”  The child nestled against me, and soon fell asleep.  I went to sleep myself—­an unquiet slumber, broken by terrifying dreams.  Sometimes I was falling from the cliffs in Sark into the deep, transparent waters below, where the sharp rocks lay like swords.  Then I was in the Gouliot Caves, with Martin Dobree at my side, and the tide was coming in too strongly for us; and beyond, in the opening through which we might have escaped, my husband’s face looked in at us, with a hideous exultation upon it.  I woke at last, shivering with cold and dread, for I had fancied that he had found me, and was carrying me away again to his old hateful haunts.

Our omnibus was jolting and rumbling down some steep and narrow streets lighted by oil-lamps swung across them.  There were no lights in any of the houses, save a few in the upper windows, as though the inmates were all in bed, or going to bed.  Only at the inn where we stopped was there any thing like life.  A lamp, which hung over the archway leading to the yard and stables, lit up a group of people waiting for the arrival of the omnibus.  I woke up Minima from her deep and heavy sleep.

“We are here at Noireau!” I said.  “We have reached our home at last!”

The door was opened before the child was fairly awake.  A small cluster of bystanders gathered round us as we alighted, and watched our luggage put down from the roof; while the driver ran on volubly, and with many gesticulations, addressed to the little crowd.  He, the chamber-maid, the landlady, and all the rest, surrounded us as solemnly as if they were assisting at a funeral.  There was not a symptom of amusement, but they all stared at us unflinchingly, as if a single wink of their eyelids would cause them to lose some extraordinary spectacle.  If I had been a total eclipse of the sun, and they a group of enthusiastic astronomers bent upon observing every phenomenon, they could not have gazed more steadily.  Minima was leaning against me, half asleep.  A narrow vista of tall houses lay to the right and left, lost in impenetrable darkness.  The strip of sky overhead was black with midnight.

“Noireau?” I asked, in a tone of interrogation.

“Oui, oui, madame,” responded a chorus of voices.