Evidently the lady had been waiting for the lift to come down, for when my guide rang and it descended she took a step forward, giving a friendly little nod to her companion, and saying, “Well, I must go.  I feel sure it’s true about her.”

Then, instead of sailing ahead of me into the lift, as she had a perfect right to do, being much older and far more important than I, and the first comer as well, she hesitated with a pleasant half smile, as much as to say, “You’re a stranger.  I give up my right to you.”

“Oh, please!” I said, stepping aside to let her pass, which she did, making room for me to sit down beside her on the narrow plush-covered seat.  But I didn’t care to sit.  I was so crushed, it seemed that, if once I sat down I shouldn’t have courage to rise up again and wrestle with the difficulties of life.

The lady got out on the second floor, throwing back a kindly glance, as if she took a little interest in me, and wanted me to know it.  I suppose it must have been because I was tired and nervous after a whole night without sleep that the shock I’d just received was too much for me.  Anyway, that kind glance made a lump rise in my throat, and the lump forced tears into my eyes.  I looked down instantly, so that she shouldn’t see them and think me an idiot, but I was afraid she did.

The young man who was taking me up to the top floor, and treating me rather nonchalantly because I was a North Roomer and a Twelve Francer, waved the lift boy aside to open the door himself for the lady; so that I knew she must be considered a person worth conciliating.

Shut up in my ten-by-six-foot room, I tried to compose myself and make plans; but to make plans on thirty-two francs, when you’ve no home, and would be far from it even if you had one; when you’ve nobody to help you, and wouldn’t want to ask them if you had—­is about as hard as to play the piano brilliantly without ever having taken a lesson.  With Princess Boriskoff dead, with Pamela de Nesle sailing for New York to-morrow morning, and no other intimate friends rich enough to do anything for me, even if they were willing to help me fly in the face of Providence and Madame Milvaine, it did seem (as Pamela herself would say) as though I were rather “up against it.”

The thought of Miss Paget suddenly jumped into my head, and the wish that, somehow, I had kept her up my sleeve as a last resort, in case she really were in earnest about her offer.  But she hadn’t told me where she was going in Italy, and it would be of no use writing to one of her English addresses, as I couldn’t stop on where I was, waiting for an answer.

Altogether things were very bad with me.

After I had sat down and thought for a while, I rang, and asked for the housekeeper.  A hint or two revealed that she was aware of what had happened, and, explaining that I was to have been Princess Boriskoff’s companion, I said that I must see the Princess’s maid.  She must come to my room.  I must have a talk with her.