And, to occupy her mind, she rose and went about to explore her new home, and to examine all it contained.  It was one of those lodgings about which the owners of houses rarely trouble themselves, and where they never make the smallest repairs, because they are always sure of renting them out just as they are.  The floor, laid in bricks, was going to pieces; and a number of bricks were loose, and shaking in their layers of cement.  The ceiling was cracked, and fell off in scales; while all along the walls it was blackened by flaring tallow-candles.  The papering, a greasy, dirty gray paper, preserved the fingermarks of all the previous occupants of the room from the time it had first been hung.  The furniture, also, was in keeping with the room,—­a walnut bedstead with faded calico curtains, a chest of drawers, a table, two chairs, and a miserable arm-chair; that was all.

A short curtain hung before the window.  By the side of the bed was a little strip of carpeting; and on the mantlepiece a zinc clock between two blue glass vases.  Nothing else!

How could M. de Brevan ever have selected such a room, such a hole?  Henrietta could not comprehend it.  He had told her, and she had believed him, that they must use extreme caution.  But would she have been any more compromised, or in greater danger of being discovered by the Countess Sarah, if they had papared the room anew, put a simple felt carpet on the floor, and furnished the room a little more decently?

Still she did not conceive any suspicion even yet.  She thought it mattered very little where and how she was lodged.  She hoped it was, after all, only for a short time, and consoled herself with the thought that a cell in a convent would have been worse still.  And any thing was better than her father’s house.

“At least,” she said, “I shall be quiet and undisturbed here.”

Perhaps she was to be morally quiet; for as to any other peace, she was soon to be taught differently.  Accustomed to the profound stillness of the immense rooms in her father’s palace, Henrietta had no idea, of course, of the incessant movement that goes on in the upper stories of these Paris lodging-houses, which contain the population of a whole village, and where the tenants, separated from each other by thin partition-walls, live, so to say, all in public.

Sleep, under such circumstances, becomes possible only after long experience; and the poor girl had to pay very dear for her apprenticeship.  It was past four o’clock before she could fall asleep, overcome by fatigue; and then it was so heavy a sleep, that she was not aroused by the stir in the whole house as day broke.  It was broad daylight, hence, when she awoke; and a pale sun-ray was gliding into the room through the torn curtain.  The zinc clock pointed at twelve o’clock.  She rose and dressed hastily.

Yesterday, when she rose, she rang her bell, and her maid came in promptly, made a fire, brought her her slippers, and threw over her shoulders a warm, wadded dressing-wrapper.  But to-day!