Her habit of self-control, her unconquerable British dislike to being seen in tears, or to making herself conspicuous, prevented her distress being so visible as to attract general attention.

Some few people remarked her as she passed--a forlorn little Evangeline--her pretty face now paler, now more flushed than its wont, as alternations of hope and fear succeeded each other, and wondered if she had lost her party or her way.

But she had disappeared before there was time to do more than notice her.

More than once she was on the point of asking help or advice from the cocked-hat officials at the doors, but she was afraid.

In some ways she was very ignorant and childish for her age, notwithstanding her little womanlinesses and almost precocious good sense, and to tell the truth, a vague misty terror was haunting her brain--a terror which she would hardly have confessed to Molly, not for worlds untold to _Ralph_--that, being in France and not in England, she might somehow be put in prison, were the state of the case known to these same cocked-hat gentlemen! So, when at last one of these dignitaries, who had been noticing her rapid progress down the long gallery "Napoleon III.," stopped her with the civil inquiry, "Had Mademoiselle lost her way?
was she seeking some one ?" she bit her lips tight and winked her eyes briskly not to cry, as she replied in her best French, "Oh no," she could find her way.