It was harnessed up immediately.  Hermione and I followed it on foot back to the little band of travellers waiting beside the railway.

“Can we not get some of your trunks out?” I said to her.

“No,” she answered:  “leave them to their fate.  I dare not overload the cart, and I doubt whether those men with hungry eyes would let us take them.  Mamma,” she whispered, “has her diamonds.”

“You will get into the cart, Miss Leare?” I said as I saw her motioning to the old colored woman to take the place beside her mother.

“No indeed,” she replied:  “our contract stipulated only for mamma, Mammy and Clary:  Mammy is crippled with rheumatism.  If you have no objection I will walk with you.”

“Objection?  No.  But it is ten miles.”

“A long stretch,” she said with a half sigh, “but I am young, strong, and excitement counts for something:  besides, there is no remedy.  We must consider them.”

There had been about fifteen other persons on the train.  A dozen of these, finding we were going to walk back to Paris, proposed to join us.  The night was growing dark, and we pushed on.  There was no woman afoot but Hermione.  “Madame” they called her, evidently taking her for my wife, but by no word or smile did she notice the blunder.  After a while she accepted my arm, drawing up her skirts by means of loops or pins.  We had one lantern among us, and from time to time its glare permitted me to see her dainty feet growing heavy with mud and travel.

It was not what could be called a lovers’ walk, tramping in the dark through mud and water, on a French country road, at a cart’s tail, and hardly a word was exchanged between us; yet had it not been for fears about her safety it would have been the most delightful expedition I had ever known.

From time to time Mrs. Leare and the old nurse in the cart complained of their bones.  Hermione was always ready with encouragement, but she said little else to any one.  She appeared to be reserving all her energies to assist her physical endurance and to strengthen her for her task of taking care of the others.

I had always seen my sisters and other girls protected, sheltered, cared for:  it gave me a sharp pang to see this beautiful and dainty creature totally unthought of by those dependent on her.  Nor did Mrs. Leare seem to feel any anxiety about my comradeship with her daughter.  I could fully appreciate Hermione’s remark about her chaperonage being very unsatisfactory.

Every now and then we passed through villages along whose straggling streets the population was aswarm, eager for news and wondering at our muddy procession.  In one of the villages I suggested stopping, but Mrs. Leare was now as frantic to get home again as she had been to get away.  She said, and truly, that it had been a wild plan to start from Paris—­that if she had seen me and had heard that I thought the emeute was at an end and that the report about the