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.

Presently, after an interval which may have been meant to emphasize her
dignity, appeared a pale, small Russian woman whose withered face was as
tragic and remote from the warmth of daily life as that of the eldest
Fate.

She could speak French, and we talked together. Yes, her mistress had
died very suddenly, but she and the doctors had always known that it
might happen so, at any moment. It was hard for me, but--what would you?
Life was hard. It might have been that I would have found life hard with
Her Highness. What was to be, would be. I must write to my friends. It
was not in her power to do anything for me. Her Highness had left no
instructions. These things happened. Well! one made the best of th