She consented, however, to give twenty francs for it, solely from love of art, she said; for it was money thrown away.  These twenty francs were, for Henrietta, an unexpected release.

“It will last me a month,” she thought, determined to live on dry bread only; “and who can tell what a month may bring forth?”

And this unfortunate girl had an inheritance from her mother of more than a million!  If she had but known it, if she had but had a single friend to advise her in her inexperience!  But she had been faithful to her vow never to let her secret be known to a living soul; and the most terrible anguish had never torn from her a single complaint.

M. de Brevan knew this full well; for he had continued his weekly visits with implacable regularity.  This perseverance, which had at first served to maintain Henrietta’s courage, had now become a source of unspeakable torture.

“Ah, I shall be avenged!” she said to him one day.  “Daniel will come back.”

But he, shrugging his shoulders, had answered,—­

“If you count upon that alone, you may as well surrender, and become my wife at once.”

She turned her head from him with an expression of ineffable disgust.  Rather the icy arms of Death!  And still the pulsations of her heart were apparently counted.  Since the end of November her twenty francs had been exhausted; and to prolong her existence she had had to resort to the last desperate expedients of extreme poverty.  All that she possessed, all that she could carry from her chamber without being stopped by the concierge, she had sold, piece by piece, bit after bit, for ten cents, for five cents, for a roll.  Her linen had been sacrificed first; then the covering of her bed, her curtains, her sheets.  The mattress had gone the way of the rest,—­the wool from the inside first, carried off by handfuls; then the ticking.

Thus, on the 25th of December, she found herself in a chamber as utterly denuded as if a fire had raged there; while she herself had on her body but a single petticoat under her thin alpaca dress, without a rag to cover herself in these wintry nights.  Two evenings before, when terror triumphed over her resolution for a time, she had written her father a long letter.  He had made no reply.  Last night she had again written in these words:—­

“I am hungry, and I have no bread.  If by tomorrow at noon you have not come to my assistance, at one o’clock you will have ceased to have a daughter.”

Tortured by cold and hunger, emaciated, and almost dying, she had waited for an answer.  At noon nothing had come.  She gave herself time till four o’clock.  Four o’clock, and no answer.

“I must make an end of it,” she said to herself.

Her preparations had been made.  She had told the Cerberus below that she would be out all the evening; and she had procured a considerable stock of charcoal.  She wrote two letters,—­one to her father, the other to M. de Brevan.