The sun sank below the distant horizon, with the trees showing clearly against it, for the atmosphere was as transparent as crystal; and the light of the stars that came out one by one almost cast a defined shadow upon our path, from the poplar-trees standing in long, straight rows in the hedges.  If I found Olivia at the end of that starlit path my gladness in it would be completed.  Yet if I found her, what then?  I should see her for a few minutes in the dull salon of a school perhaps with some watchful, spying Frenchwoman present.  I should simply satisfy myself that she was living.  There could be nothing more between us.  I dare not tell her how dear she was to me, or ask her if she ever thought of me in her loneliness and friendlessness.  I began to wish that I had brought Johanna with me, who could have taken her in her arms, and kissed and comforted her.  Why had I not thought of that before?

As we proceeded at our delusive pace along the last stage of our journey, I began to sound the driver, cautiously wheeling about the object of my excursion into those remote regions.  I had tramped through Normandy and Brittany three or four times, but there had been no inducement to visit Noireau, which resembled a Lancashire cotton-town, and I had never been there.

“There are not many English at Noireau?” I remarked, suggestively.

“Not one,” he replied—­“not one at this moment.  There was one little English mam’zelle—­peste!—­a very pretty little English girl, who was voyaging precisely like you, m’sieur, some months ago.  There was a little child with her, and the two were quite alone.  They are very intrepid, are the English mam’zelles.  She did not know a word of our language.  But that was droll, m’sieur!  A French demoiselle would never voyage like that.”

The little child puzzled me.  Yet I could not help fancying that this young Englishwoman travelling alone, with no knowledge of French, must be my Olivia.  At any rate it could be no other than Miss Ellen Martineau.

“Where was she going to?” I asked.

“She came to Noireau to be an instructress in an establishment,” answered the driver, in a tone of great enjoyment—­“an establishment founded by the wife of Monsieur Emile Perrier, the avocat!  He! he! he!  Mon Dieu! how droll that was, m’sieur!  An avocat!  So they believed that in England?  Bah!  Emile Perrier an avocat—­mon Dieu!”

“But what is there to laugh at?” I asked, as the man’s laughter rang through the quiet night.

“Am I an avocat?” he inquired derisively, “am I a proprietor? am I even a cure?  Pardon, m’sieur, but I am just as much avocat, proprietor, cure, as Emile Perrier.  He was an impostor.  He became bankrupt; he and his wife ran away to save themselves; the establishment was broken up.  It was a bubble, m’sieur, and it burst comme ca.”

My driver clapped his hands together lightly, as though Monsieur Perrier’s bubble needed very little pressure to disperse it.