at she has been wise
enough to stick to her bed."

"Ah!" answered the landlady rather spitefully. "I have made up my mind
regarding that young lady some time ago; she is a sight too pretty for
this house, and so I tell you."

The Hotel de Perou stands in the Rue de la Hachette, not twenty steps
from the Place de Petit Pont; and no more cruelly sarcastic title could
ever have been conferred on a building. The extreme shabbiness of the
exterior of the house, the narrow, muddy street in which it stood,
the dingy windows covered with mud, and repaired with every variety of
patch,--all seemed to cry out to the passers by: "This is the chosen
abode of misery and destitution."

The observer might have fancied it a robbers' den, but he would have
been wrong; for the inhabitants were fairly honest. The Hotel de Perou
was one of those refuges, growing scarcer and more scarce every day,
where unhappy men and women, who had been worsted in the battle of life,
could find a shelter in return for the change remaining from the last
five-franc piece. They treat it as the shipwrecked mariner uses the rock
upon which he climbs from the whirl of the angry waters, and breathes
a deep sigh of relief as he collects his forces for a fresh effort.
However wretched existence may be, a protracted sojourn in such a
shelter as the Hotel de Perou would be out of the question. The chambers
in every floor of the house are divided into small slips by partitions,
covered with canvas and paper, and pleasantly termed rooms by M.
Loupins. The partitions were in a terrible condition, rickety and
unstable, and the paper with which they were covered torn and hanging
down in tatters; but the state of the attics was even more deplorable,
the ceilings of which were so low that the occupants had to stoop
continually, while the dormer windows admitted but a small amount of
light. A bedstead, with a straw mattress, a rickety table, and two
broken chairs, formed the sole furniture of these rooms. Miserable
as these dormitories were, the landlady asked and obtained twenty-two
francs for them by the month, as there was a fireplace in each, which
she always pointed out to intending tenants.

The young woman whom M. Loupins alluded to by the name of Rose was
seated in one of these dreary dens on this bitter winter's day. Rose was
an exquisitely beautiful girl about eighteen years of age. She was very
fair; her long lashes partially concealed a pair of steely blue ey