“Owe?”

“Why, yes!  The furniture here has never been paid for.”

“What?  The furniture”—­

“Of course, M. Maxime was going to pay for it; he has told me so.  But if you fall out in this way—­you understand, don’t you?”

She hardly did understand such fearful infamy.  Still Henrietta did not show her indignation and surprise.  She asked,—­

“What did the furniture of this room cost? do you know?”

“I don’t know.  Something like five or six hundred francs, things are so dear now!” The whole was probably not worth a hundred and fifty or two hundred francs.

“Very well.  I’ll pay,” said Henrietta.  “The man will give me forty-eight hours’ time, I presume?”

“Oh, certainly!”

As the poor girl was now quite sure that this honeyed Megsera was employed by M. de Brevan to watch her, she affected a perfectly calm air.  When she had finished her dinner, she even insisted upon paying on the spot fifty francs, which she owed for the last few days, and for some small purchases.  But, when the old woman was gone, she sank into a chair, and said,—­

“I am lost!”

There was, in fact, no refuge for her, no help to be expected.

Should she return to her father, and implore the pity of his wife?  Ah! death itself would be more tolerable than such a humiliation.  And besides, in escaping from M. de Brevan, would she not fall into the hands of M. Elgin?

Should she seek assistance at the hands of some of the old family friends?  But which?

In greater distress than the shipwrecked man who in vain examines the blank horizon, she looked around for some one to help her.  She forced her mind to recall all the people she had ever known.  Alas! she knew, so to say, nobody.  Since her mother had died, and she had been living alone, no one seemed to have remembered her, unless for the purpose of calumniating her.

Her only friends, the only ones who had made her cause their own, the Duke and the Duchess of Champdoce, were in Italy, as she had been assured.

“I can count upon nobody but myself,” she repeated,—­“myself, myself!”

Then rousing herself, she said, her heart swelling with emotion,—­

“But never mind!  I shall be saved!”

Her safety depended upon one single point:  if she could manage to live till she came of age, or till Daniel returned, all was right.

“Is it really so hard to live?” she thought.  “The daughters of poor people, who are as completely forsaken as I am, nevertheless live.  Why should not I live also?”

Why?

Because the children of poor people have served, so to say, from the cradle, an apprenticeship of poverty,—­because they are not afraid of a day without work, or a day without bread,—­because cruel experience has armed them for the struggle,—­because, in fine, they know life, and they know Paris,—­because their industry is adapted to their wants, and they have an innate capacity to obtain some advantage from every thing, thanks to their smartness, their enterprise, and their energy.