CHAPTER II.
PRINCE CHERI.
"I'll take my guinea-pig always to church." CHILD WORLD.
If it were cold just then in the thick-walled, well-warmed old house, which was Jeanne's home, you may fancy _how_ cold it was in the rumbling diligence, which in those days was the only way of travelling in France.
And for a little boy whose experience of long journeys was small, this one was really rather trying.

But Jeanne's cousin Hugh was a very patient little boy.

His life, since his parents' death, had not been a _very_ happy one, and he had learnt to bear troubles without complaining.

And now that he was on his way to the kind cousins his mother had so often told him of, the cousins who had been so kind to _her_, before she had any home of her own, his heart was so full of happiness that, even if the journey had been twice as cold and uncomfortable, he would not have thought himself to be pitied.
It was a pale little face, however, which looked out of the diligence window at the different places where it stopped, and a rather timid voice which asked in the pretty broken French he had not quite forgotten since the days that his mother taught him her own language, for a little milk for his "pet." The pet, which had travelled on his knees all the way from England--comfortably nestled up in hay and cotton wool in its cage, which looked something like a big mouse-trap--much better off in its way certainly than its poor little master.

But it was a great comfort to him: the sight of its funny little nose poking out between the bars of its cage made Hugh feel ever so much less lonely, and when he had secured a little milk for his guinea-pig he did not seem to mind half so much about anything for himself.
Still it was a long and weary journey, and poor Hugh felt very glad when he was wakened up from the uncomfortable dose, which was all in the way of sleep he could manage, to be told that at last they had arrived.