“Where are we going, papa?” Helen had walked some way, bewildered and wondering, through the foreign streets, confused by the strange language round her, the unfamiliar look of everything, the strangeness of her situation altogether. They had set out walking, and seemed, she thought, to be going on vaguely from street to street without any aim, passing hotel after hotel, at any of which she would have been glad to rest and collect her thoughts after the rough voyage and all the agitations of the night. “Where are you doing to take us, papa?” said little Janey, running along by his side. The child was pale, too, and her pretty, costly clothes had already acquired that look of crumpled finery which garments too good for common use so easily assume. Helen, too, had found it very difficult to manage her dress, with its train, made for no greater exertion than to sweep over the velvet lawns at Fareham. It had dropped from her hand now and then. It had got crushed and crumpled and a little soiled with the wet deck. It looked like a dress that had been worn all night. The signs of the night journey and rough sea were unmistakable upon them. Mr Goulburn made no reply. He murmured something to soothe the little girl, but made no answer to Helen. Their questions, however, seemed to rouse him to action. He went into a shop which was full of articles de voyage, and there bought a large second-hand portmanteau, considerably battered, and one of those iron-bound trunks which are used by Continental travellers. Then he put a purse into Helen’s hand, and took her to the door of another shop, in which were exhibited all kinds of feminine apparel. “Buy what is wanted for yourself and her,” he said. Helen had scarcely ever in her life so much as entered a shop alone, but necessity overcomes everything, even the shy inexperience of a girl. She went in submissively, trembling to face the brisk saleswoman, all her schoolroom French deserting her in this earliest emergency. Nevertheless, she managed to do what was absolutely essential. As for Janey, she proved herself much more a woman of the world than her elder sister. The whole adventure was a frolic to Janey—a frolic which the voyage had unpleasantly interrupted, but which had now regained its jollity and excitement. She made her choice among the different dresses exhibited to them with unfailing promptitude. “I am doing to have this,” she said in her childish peremptory tone, to the great delight of the shopwomen, who gathered round her, offering her their wares. The little English child, recovering all the vivacity of her childish spirits, and excited by the laughter and flatteries, though she did not understand them, of the French milliners, was an amusing little figure, and the scene like a scene in a comedy. Janey inspected all the garments, feeling the texture with her baby fingers, assuming a hundred little airs of importance. She chattered without ceasing, a perpetual flood of remarks, while the women laughed and admired.

“What does she say?” they asked the one among them who partially justified the “Ici on parle Anglais,” in the shop-window.

“Elle est dÉlicieuse,” the shopwoman said; “elle est jolie comme un coeur: et d’un goÛt!”

Janey did not understand a word, but all the same knew she was being applauded, and her little head was turned by the notice bestowed upon her. “We came without any boxes or frocks or anything, and papa is doing to let me buy whatever I like,” said Janey.

The women were curious beyond description when this was rapidly reported to them by the one who understood. All this strange little scene went on while Helen, still half dazed, stammered out her orders in her faltering, imperfect French, and accepted timidly what was offered to her. The colour came to her cheeks, and a painful prick of life to her being, when she heard her little sister’s indiscreet explanation. “We left all our things behind—by mistake,” she said, trembling, a tingling, smarting blush dyeing her face. The timid falsehood redoubled her own confusion, but it did not do much more. It changed, Helen thought, the looks of the women. They followed her about, she fancied, trying to elicit further revelations from Janey, pressing every kind of outfit upon her; watching her as if—— What did they imagine? Did they think she would steal something? Helen’s heart swelled so in her simplicity that she thought it would burst. She held Janey’s hand closely in her own, and squeezed it tight. “Don’t talk so, don’t talk so,” she whispered. And then asked herself, with an indescribable pang, why should not the child talk? A grey light of knowledge, a vague, miserable twilight of consciousness, like the first lightening of a gloomy dawn, was stealing over her. When she had made her purchases—two frocks for Janey, the simplest which that little heroine could be prevailed on to accept, and a plain dark dress for herself, and a supply of underclothing,—she found her father at the door, with the box he had bought upon a cab. This was how they were provided with the luggage which is indispensable to respectability. Helen could not but look at him with different eyes, now that she felt herself a party to this fraud, which she began to be conscious of, without knowing what it meant. What did it mean? Almost involuntarily unawares had not she herself made a false statement in explanation of the extraordinary straits in which they were placed? She watched her father, and found him altered, she could scarcely tell how. His hair had changed its colour; his beard had grown miraculously in a single night. What did it mean? Her heart ached with the question, but she did not know how to reply.

He took them to the railway after this—to the railway again, after all their past fatigue. He was not negligent, however, of their comfort, but made them eat at the buffet, and took a coupÉ for them, filling it with all the picture-books and papers he could find, with baskets of fruit and chocolate and bonbons. “Here is a corner where my little Janey can go to sleep,” he said, putting the child tenderly into it when the train had started. Janey jumped upon his knee, and began to chatter and give him an account of her own achievements at the shop.

“They understood me,” said the little thing, “better than Helen. I can’t speak French, but they understood me better than Helen. Papa, do you hear? they understood me——” Here she paused and gave a sudden cry. She had a pretty way of calling the attention of the careless listener, drawing his face round with her little hand upon his chin. “Papa!” she said, in great alarm, “you have dot hair on your chin, and it moves. Oh! papa!”

His face grew crimson. He turned the child down from his knee, giving her a sudden sharp blow on the cheek with his open hand—a blow which was nothing, yet like a revolution of earth and heaven to Janey, and to Helen too. Then, muttering a curse under his breath, he turned to Helen, who was watching him, pale with terror and wonder and indignation. “Well!” he said, defiantly; “out with it! You are a spy upon me too. Let me hear what you have got to say.”

“I have nothing to say, papa,” said Helen, trembling. She looked at him wistfully, with miserable insight in her eyes. She saw now that it was all false—hair and complexion and even expression. It seemed to her, as she looked at him, that it was not her father at all; that it was some strange masquerader of whose identity she never could be sure again. There had been no special devotion between Helen and her father; he had been kind but careless, and she too had been careless, though affectionate enough; but the miserable pang with which she seemed to lose her hold of him, and with him of everything solid and steadfast in the world, was more terrible than anything she had ever felt before. Her life seemed to be rent up by the roots. Janey, whimpering and astonished, took refuge in her corner, and by-and-by, worn out, dropped happily asleep. But Helen could not sleep. Worn out too, but watchful, she sat upright by her father’s side, not venturing to look at him, seeing the long, flat, level lines of the country fly past the carriage-windows with a tedium that made her eyes ache. And he too sat bolt-upright, not looking at her. She had found him out; and he perceived that she had found him out; but yet she had not got a step farther, or discovered any real clue to the meaning of the flight which she shared.

They travelled all that night, the second since they left home, Janey sleeping in her corner, but Helen sitting sleepless, though worn to death; and next day in the forenoon stopped at a sleepy little French town, by a slow, pale, chalk river, amid interminable lines of poplars. Words could not tell the weariness which possessed Helen, the overmastering desire she felt to lay herself down anywhere, it did not matter where; while at the same time the routine of the continued movement had got into her brain, and it seemed to have become natural to go on and on, watching those long lines of distance, those flying plains, monotonous and endless, those rivers and fields. When the train stopped with a jar, and with cramped limbs they stepped out and stood upon the ordinary soil, the stoppage itself was a shock to Helen’s nerves. It was midday of a bright October day when they drove over the stony pavement in a jumbling omnibus, and rattled into a large square inhabited by a cathedral and town-hall of imposing architecture, with two little soldiers in red uniforms lounging under an archway, and two people crossing the sunshine, going in different directions. The white houses, tall and trim, with their green persiennes, the great tower of the church cutting the blue sky, the two figures crossing the sunshine printed themselves vaguely on Helen’s mind. She could not see anything plainly for that vision of her father always before her who was not her father. She did not like to look at him, yet saw his changed countenance and false beard all the time with that sense of the insupportable which only our own flesh and blood ever give us. She could not forget it as Janey forgot, from whose little mind the incident of the night had fled like last year’s snow. Janey ran into the bare, carpetless room at the inn, and climbed up upon the wooden chair at the window, and called to papa—“Why do they have all the curtains drawn at the windows, and why is there nobody in the street, and why are the soldiers so little, and what have they dot red trousers for?” cried Janey. The blow had gone from her recollection. She thought no more of that novelty of the beard. She had slept all night, and she was no longer tired, though she was pale.

“Do you mean to stay here, papa?” said Helen. It is dreadful to sit at table with any one and not to speak. She could not bear it; if he would not say anything to her, she must talk to him.

“It does not look a very interesting place, you mean? No picture-galleries or fine things to see. That is a pity; but if you do not object to it too much, it suits me to stay here for a little while.”

“I do not object at all, papa,” said poor Helen, ready to cry, “only—only——” She looked at him with wistful eyes.

“Only what? If you don’t object to me and everything about me, you should try not to look as if you did. Understand, once for all, that I understand my own motives and you don’t. And I don’t mean to be forced to explain by any one, much less my own child.”

“Papa,” said Janey, “you souldn’t be cross. You dave me a slap last night, but I never was cross. I did not look like this,” and she covered her innocent forehead with the most portentous of frowns. “I forgave you,” said the child, mastering the “g” with an effort, and looking up at him with a countenance clear as the day, not like the troubled face of Helen. The man was more touched than words could say. He caught her up in his arms.

“Yes, my little darling,” he said, “I did; God forgive me! I gave this dear little cheek a tap. I may have done other things as wrong, but none that I regretted so much. But you forgive your poor old father, Janey? I would not hurt you, my pet, not a hair of your pretty head, for the world.”

“I knew you would be sorry, papa,” said the little girl, with the air of a little queen. Then she lifted up her tiny forefinger, with serious yet mischievous warning, “But you sould never be cross,” she said.

How different was Helen’s state from the innocent, tender play of the child! She sat immovable and looked on at this pretty scene, seeing her father’s countenance change, the hard lines melt, a tender light come over it. He kissed his little Janey with a kind of reverential passion. “I will try, my little love,” he said, as humble as a child. And while he kissed her half weeping, and she clung with both her little arms round his neck, Helen felt herself rigid as stone. She could not be touched even by that which was most pathetic in this little episode—the real emotion of the man whose conscience was certainly not void of greater offences, yet whose heart melted at the pretty majesty of his child’s reproof, her innocent counsel and authority. Helen sat and looked on like some one entirely outside, a world apart from this tender union. She did not share the emotion of it, nor the sweetness. Her heart seemed made of lead; her eyes were dry as summer dust. She turned away from them, not to see the innocent rapture of the father and child. The bare little salle À manger, with its long table thinly covered; the bare board; the windows with their close white curtains; the all-prevailing odour of soup and cigars; the clashing of the ostler’s pails outside; the high-pitched voices; the language only half comprehensible,—made up a scene for her which she never forgot. Their strange meal was over—a dozen unknown dishes—and they had been left with a plate of fruit on the table and a bottle of vin du pays, which Helen thought so sour. She was wearied to death, but she no longer felt that devouring desire to lie down and go to sleep. The pain had roused her; it seemed to her for the moment as if she could never sleep again.

Then she went up-stairs to the little bare bedroom above, where two white beds stood side by side, two windows with the same white, closely fixed curtains, a carpetless, curtainless room, with everything as bare and wooden, as clean and white, as could be desired. She had to open the new trunk and take out all their new things, which did not belong to her, which belonged to a fugitive, the daughter of a man who had fled from his own country and home in disguise, and at the dead of night. It seemed to her that she could never tolerate this livery of shame, or think of it save with a burning as of disgrace upon her countenance. Perhaps it was partly because she was so worn out that she took everything so tragically. She went out afterwards to see the town, following her father, who led little Janey by the hand, delighted by all her demands. The little girl prattled without ceasing, asking questions about everything. “Why are they such little soldiers?” she said; “they are like the little men in my Swiss village; and why have they dot red trousers instead of red coats? Is it with walking in the enemy’s blood, papa? like the Bible,” said Janey.

“Hush, hush! there cannot be anything like that in the Bible, Janey.”

“Ah! that is because you don’t read the lessons. You should read the lessons every day,” said Janey, delighted with her rÔle of counsellor, “like nurse, papa! How funny it would be when nurse went up-stairs and found only dolly in my little bed, and Janey gone away!” She laughed, and then looked at him with a look of examination more keen than that timid, wistful look of Helen’s. “But I like this,” she added; “it is funny. Why do the little children wear caps? And what funny little shoes, that make such a noise! And why do they all speak French, papa? Who taught them to speak French?” Janey, in her fresh wonder, put all the threadbare questions that everybody has put before. She skipped upon the rough stones by her father’s side, holding his hand tight; and the three people who were in the great square (besides the soldiers) looked upon the pair with kindly eyes, and pointed out to each other that the newly arrived Anglais worshipped his child. They have the domestic instinct above all—they adore their infants. “But tiens,” they said; “is it madame the young wife who follows with a look so maussade?”

The sympathies of these spectators were all with the father and the child. Helen followed like a creature in a dream. The great, silent, empty, open cathedral, with its altars all dressed in artificial lilies, and the scent of incense still in the air, came into her silent picture-gallery with all its details distinct, yet strange; and the long line of boulevard with its trees, and the white houses with their veiled windows, and the clanking of the sabots, and the little soldiers in the archway. They gave her no pleasure as of a novel sight, but they completed the vague, feverish world around her, so dim to her mental perception, yet keenly clear to her outward eye in the sharp blueness of the sky, the more vivid tints of an atmosphere without smoke. They went over all the town thus, mounting to the ramparts, going through all the narrow streets: Janey dancing along with her hand in her father’s, Helen following, silent, like a creature walking in her sleep, taking in all the novel scene only as a background to the pain of her soul.