The natural thing to propose was, that I should find for Miss Jones a respectable boarding-house, and that she should remain there until her trunk was found, or till she could write to friends who had this fatal address, and receive an answer.  But here she hesitated.  She hardly liked to explain why,—­did not explain wholly.  But she did not say that she had no friends who knew this address.  She had but few relations in the world, and her aunt had communicated with her alone since she came from Europe.  As for the boarding-house, “I had rather look for work,” she said bravely.  “I have never promised to pay money when I did not know how to obtain it; and that”—­and here she took out fifty or sixty cents from her purse—­“and that is all now.  In respectable boarding-houses, when people come without luggage, they are apt to ask for an advance.  Or, at least,” she added with some pride, “I am apt to offer it.”

I hastened to ask her to take all my little store; but I had to own that I had not two dollars.  I was sure, however, that my overcoat and the dress-suit I wore would avail me something, if I thrust them boldly up some spout.  I was sure that I should be at work within a day or two.  At all events, I was certain of the cyclopaedia the next day.  That should go to old Gowan’s,—­in Fulton Street it was then,—­“the moral centre of the intellectual world,” in the hour I got it.  And at this moment, for the first time, the thought crossed me, “If mine could only be the name drawn, so that that foolish $5,000 should fall to me.”  In that case I felt that Fausta might live in “a respectable boarding-house” till she died.  Of this, of course, I said nothing, only that she was welcome to my poor dollar and a half, and that I should receive the next day some more money that was due me.

“You forget, Mr. Carter,” replied Fausta, as proudly as before,—­“you forget that I cannot borrow of you any more than of a boarding-house-keeper.  I never borrow.  Please God, I never will.  It must be,” she added, “that in a Christian city like this there is some respectable and fit arrangement made for travellers who find themselves where I am.  What that provision is I do not know; but I will find out what it is before this sun goes down.”

I paused a moment before I replied.  If I had been fascinated by this lovely girl before, I now bowed in respect before her dignity and resolution; and, with my sympathy, there was a delicious throb of self-respect united, when I heard her lay down so simply, as principles of her life, two principles on which I had always myself tried to live.  The half-expressed habits of my boyhood and youth were now uttered for me as axioms by lips which I knew could speak nothing but right and truth.

I paused a moment.  I stumbled a little as I expressed my regret that she would not let me help her,—­joined with my certainty that she was in the right in refusing,—­and then it the only stiff speech I ever made to her, I said:—­