The young woman’s first thought was to join the tenor Cazaboni, whom at the last she had not dared to invite to her ball; but he lived at Montmartre, and that was very far away for her to go, in that garb; and then, would he be at home?  Her parents would take her in, doubtless; but she could already hear Madame Chebe’s lamentations and the little man’s sermon under three heads.  Thereupon she thought of Delobelle, her old Delobelle.  In the downfall of all her splendors she remembered the man who had first initiated her into fashionable life, who had given her lessons in dancing and deportment when she was a little girl, laughed at her pretty ways, and taught her to look upon herself as beautiful before any one had ever told her that she was so.  Something told her that that fallen star would take her part against all others.  She entered one of the carriages standing at the gate and ordered the driver to take her to the actor’s lodgings on the Boulevard Beaumarchais.

For some time past Mamma Delobelle had been making straw hats for export-a dismal trade if ever there was one, which brought in barely two francs fifty for twelve hours’ work.

And Delobelle continued to grow fat in the same degree that his “sainted wife” grew thin.  At the very moment when some one knocked hurriedly at his door he had just discovered a fragrant soup ‘au fromage’, which had been kept hot in the ashes on the hearth.  The actor, who had been witnessing at Beaumarchais some dark-browed melodrama drenched with gore even to the illustrated headlines of its poster, was startled by that knock at such an advanced hour.

“Who is there?” he asked in some alarm.

“It is I, Sidonie.  Open the door quickly.”

She entered the room, shivering all over, and, throwing aside her wrap, went close to the stove where the fire was almost extinct.  She began to talk at once, to pour out the wrath that had been stifling her for an hour, and while she was describing the scene in the factory, lowering her voice because of Madame Delobelle, who was asleep close by, the magnificence of her costume in that poor, bare, fifth floor, the dazzling whiteness of her disordered finery amid the heaps of coarse hats and the wisps of straw strewn about the room, all combined to produce the effect of a veritable drama, of one of those terrible upheavals of life when rank, feelings, fortunes are suddenly jumbled together.

“Oh!  I never shall return home.  It is all over.  Free—­I am free!”

“But who could have betrayed you to your husband?” asked the actor.

“It was Frantz!  I am sure it was Frantz.  He wouldn’t have believed it from anybody else.  Only last evening a letter came from Egypt.  Oh! how he treated me before that woman!  To force me to kneel!  But I’ll be revenged.  Luckily I took something to revenge myself with before I came away.”

And the smile of former days played about the corners of her pale lips.